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tron-01799 | EpiPen Maker Donated to Clinton Foundation, Hiked Prices | truth! & fiction! | https://www.truthorfiction.com/epipen-maker-donated-clinton-foundation-hiked-prices/ | null | health-medical | null | null | ['congress', 'hillary clinton', 'the clintons'] | EpiPen Maker Donated to Clinton Foundation, Hiked Prices | Aug 25, 2016 | null | ['None'] |
pose-00595 | We need to support our hard working, dedicated teachers who understand the importance of getting good results. I believe we should hold people accountable for those results and when they produce, they should be rewarded. In business, we judge that by the quality of work people produce. In the same way, a 'merit pay' plan would reward high-performing teachers and hold school administrators accountable, while under-performing teachers would be challenged to improve. | promise kept | https://www.politifact.com/florida/promises/scott-o-meter/promise/619/pay-teachers-based-on-performance-merit-pay/ | null | scott-o-meter | Rick Scott | null | null | Pay teachers based on performance (merit pay) | 2010-12-21T09:36:20 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-10439 | Clinton aides admit it (a gas tax holiday) won't do much for you – but would help her politically. | mostly false | /truth-o-meter/statements/2008/may/07/barack-obama/aides-said-"even-if"-it-doesnt-work/ | An ad for Sen. Barack Obama attacks Sen. Hillary Clinton on her gas tax holiday proposal: "More 'low road' attacks from Hillary Clinton…Now she's pushing a 'bogus' gas tax gimmick…Experts say it'll just 'boost oil industry profits' ….they'll 'simply raise prices and pocket… the difference.' Clinton aides admit it won't do much for you – but would help her politically. So here's the choice…Clinton gimmicks that help big oil…or Barack Obama… a real energy plan and a $1,000 middle class tax cut to help families truly pay the bills." On the stump, Obama has echoed the same point. "In a moment of candor, her advisors actually admitted that it wouldn't have much of an effect on gas prices," Obama said. Clinton aides said their own boss' plan won't work? That's a pretty big act of political self-sabotage on the part of those Clinton aides -- if it's true. The Obama campaign pointed to a quote in an April 30, 2008, report by Perry Bacon Jr. of the Washington Post . The report appeared on its campaign blog The Trail . The story highlights Clinton's growing confidence in the days before the North Carolina and Indiana primaries -- confidence that proved misplaced as Clinton lost North Carolina and won Indiana by two points. The story describes campaign strategies, the controversy over Obama's former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and the gas tax holiday. Here's the single sentence about what her aides said about the gas tax: "Clinton aides think that even if the measure is a limited way to reduce gas prices, it allows the candidate to bash oil companies and cast her opponent against an idea that has political appeal." That doesn't sound like an admission from Clinton aides that the gas tax holiday won't work. Note the words "even if" -- it sounds more like a response to critics who say it won't work. (And there are many critics who say it won't work; see our previous story on gas taxes here .) Clinton's aides seem to be saying that even if the critics are right, the gas tax holiday still has political benefits for Clinton. But it doesn't say that the aides themselves believe that to be the case. Granted, this is a close reading of one sentence that hinges on the key words "even if." Nevertheless, the Obama campaign ad and Obama himself seem to be puffing up the sentence to say more than it actually says. Do Clinton aides think that the gas tax won't work? Certainly it's possible, but the Washington Post story doesn't answer that question. The sentence is a paraphrase of an anonymous source, which makes it impossible to find out what the aides really think. Obama says that Clinton aides admit the plan won't do much good. We find the aides say that it's a plan that has political benefits, whether it works or not. There's a gap between those two statements. We rate Obama's statement Barely True. Editor's note: This statement was rated Barely True when it was published. On July 27, 2011, we changed the name for the rating to Mostly False. | null | Barack Obama | null | null | null | 2008-05-07T00:00:00 | 2008-05-05 | ['Bill_Clinton'] |
pomt-05173 | Say Portland Public Schools' central administration makes up less than 4 percent of the staff. | mostly true | /oregon/statements/2012/jun/15/portland-public-schools/portland-public-schools-administration-top-heavy/ | Portland Public Schools, like most of Oregon’s school districts, is struggling to keep class sizes down and school years full even as budget conditions force reductions. In a recent opinion piece printed in The Oregonian, one parent advocate suggested the district try harder to consolidate schools before asking voters to approve a bond. "Cut bureaucracy," wrote Lainie Block Wilker. "Media reports confirm PPS' top-heavy bureaucracy. KPMG's audit recommended reducing management layers." This didn’t sit so well with some school board members, who promptly responded with their own opinion piece, also printed by The Oregonian. (Five others also signed onto this commentary.) "Wilker claims that PPS administration is "top-heavy," wrote members Ruth Adkins and Trudy Sargent. "The 14-year-old KPMG audit she cites actually commended the district for ‘maintaining a lean administrative staff that accounts for 8 percent of PPS' total staff.’ Since then, central administration has been reduced by one-half and is now less than 4 percent of PPS's staff. Next year's budget further reduces central staff by 10 percent. Central administrative costs are not a reason to oppose the bond." As reporters, we’re always a little suspicious when it comes to bureaucratic management, so we decided to check out the claim that central administration is "less than 4 percent of PPS’s staff." First, we went back to the audit that got flagged in both commentaries. The "Comprehensive Performance Audit of the Portland Public Schools" was published Sept. 3, 1998, by auditing firm KPMG. The audit points out several shortcomings of the district -- but the size of the administration is certainly not one. In one section, as the two board members point out, the audit commends the district for "maintaining a lean administrative staff that accounts for 8% of PPS’ total staff." That’s not to say the audit didn’t find some places for further reductions. Auditors identified various areas where management could be shaved, but time and time again it confirms that the number of management layers and the ratio of managers to non-managers met industry "best practices." The auditors, unfortunately, did not clarify what they meant by "administrative staff." We called the auditing firm, but they weren’t able to track down anybody familiar enough with the 14-year-old audit to give us definitions. Our next stop was Portland Public Schools spokesman Matt Shelby, who outlined the staff breakdown for this year and next. The Oregon Department of Education asks school districts to classify spending under four specific categories: direct classroom, classroom support, building support and central support. Currently, there are about 152 full-time-equivalent positions in central support at Portland Public Schools. This category, according to the state’s definition, includes "executive administration, business and fiscal services, personnel services, retirement incentives, and public information." That means it covers the superintendent’s office, as well as the legal, finance, insurance and human relation divisions -- among others. All told, there are some 4,048 budgeted FTE positions, which means that the board members were right -- central support makes up just under 4 percent of the total PPS staffing. That said, even though it’s a rigidly managed state definition, central support doesn’t cover all the positions that your average Oregonian might call "administrative." Building support, for example, which has 596 budget positions, includes IT, security, utilities, purchasing, warehouse and others. Direct classroom and classroom support make up the majority of staffing, more than 80 percent, including teachers, curriculum services, social work services, athletics and others. All this is to say, yes, "central support" -- which is the word the school board members used in their commentary -- is less than 4 percent of the PPS staff. But that definition covers a very specific sort of employee and not necessarily every employee that somebody on the outside might consider "administrative." Now, for that last bit. Is central support really getting cut by 10 percent next year? At first blush, no. There are 152 positions budgeted this year and 146 budgeted for the next. That’s a 4 percent decline. We checked in with Robb Cowie, the district’s chief spokesman, who pointed out that central support is really losing 15 positions when you consider that eight translation service positions are moving from other areas to central support. If you ignore that transfer, the board members are right about the 10 percent reduction. Is Portland Public Schools "top-heavy" as one parent advocate described it? That’s really not for us to say. What we can say, however, is that central support -- as the state defines it -- accounts for 4 percent of the budgeted positions at Portland Public Schools. We can also say that central support will see a 10 percent reduction in its current FTE positions next year. Technically, then, the board members are right on all counts. However, there’s some important context in the fact that central support is a bureaucratic term that doesn’t necessarily reflect the full scope of administrative employees working for Portland Public Schools. We rate this claim Mostly True -- it’s accurate, but it requires some clarification. | null | Portland Public Schools | null | null | null | 2012-06-15T15:35:31 | 2012-06-11 | ['None'] |
tron-00198 | Beached Whale Found in Utah | fiction! | https://www.truthorfiction.com/beached-whale-utah/ | null | 9-11-attack | null | null | null | Beached Whale Found in Utah – Fiction! | Mar 17, 2015 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-10715 | Murder went up when Romney was governor. "Robbery went up. Violent crimes went up." | half-true | /truth-o-meter/statements/2007/nov/26/rudy-giuliani/murders-went-up-but-all-violence-declined/ | We evaluated Rudy Giuliani's attack on Mitt Romney by looking at the FBI's uniform crime statistics. Romney became governor in January 2003 and left office in January 2007. Comparing the numbers between 2002 and 2006, we can calculate how crime rates changed in Massachusetts during the Romney administration. To count violent crime, the FBI includes murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery and aggravated assault. In 2002, that number was 31,137 in Massachusetts. In 2006, it was 28,775. That means violent crime declined 7.6 percent, just like Romney claims. Giuliani is wrong on this point. But let's take a closer look at murders and robberies. Murders went up from 173 in 2002 to 186 in 2006, for an increase of 7.5 percent. The murder rate — the number of people murdered per 100,000 people — moved up from 2.7 to 2.9. Robberies increased more than murders. Robberies in Massachusetts increased from 7,169 to 8,047, a jump of 12.2 percent. The robbery rate increased from 111.5 to 125. So what made the violent crime rate go down if murders and robberies went up? The biggest category decline under Romney was aggravated assault, which declined from 22,018 to 18,800, a drop of 14.6 percent. Given these numbers, Giuliani is right when he says murders and robberies went up, but wrong when he says violent crime went up. We rate his claim Half True. | null | Rudy Giuliani | null | null | null | 2007-11-26T00:00:00 | 2007-11-24 | ['None'] |
pomt-08715 | Since being elected, (Tom Barrett) has dumped 8.2 billion gallons of raw sewage into Lake Michigan. | mostly false | /wisconsin/statements/2010/sep/03/scott-walker/scott-walker-blames-tom-barrett-dumping-sewage-lak/ | Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker is raising a stink over sewage. It’s a tempting target, especially when torrential rains July 22 and July 23 forced the dumping of untreated sewage into Lake Michigan and thousands of homes were hit with flooded basements. Walker, a Republican candidate for governor, is blaming his opponent, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, a Democrat, for dumping the sewage -- not only for the July overflows, but for releases going back to 2004, when Barrett was first elected. On at least two occasions, Walker campaign manager Keith Gilkes blamed Barrett for the recent mess and previous overflows. On Aug. 5, Gilkes made the charge during a visit to the city by Lisa Jackson, head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. On Aug. 11, he made the same charge after local communities complained about a large water rate increase being proposed by Barrett’s Milwaukee Water Works. With summer winding down, it’s a topic fresh in many people’s minds: torrents of water running through streets, the giant sinkhole on E. North Ave. that swallowed a Cadillac Escalade and the mounds of water-soaked junk carted from homes in the aftermath. Five to eight inches of rain fell July 22 and July 23, according to the National Weather Service. Officially, 5.61 inches fell at Mitchell International Airport, the second highest daily rainfall on record for Milwaukee. With so much rain, Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District reported it couldn’t treat 2.1 billion gallons of sewage and storm water, which ended up going in the lake. MMSD has done that every year, to varying degrees depending on the weather: When the deep tunnels run out of room and the sewage treatment plants on Jones Island and South Shore can’t keep up, the district shuts off access to the tunnels and sends untreated sewage into the lake. The overflows present environmental problems for the lake, but without them, sewage is more apt to back up into people’s basements. By law, the district is required to report the releases to the state Department of Natural Resources. Going back to when Barrett was first elected mayor, and highlighting a campaign promise made in 2004, the Walker campaign said the sewage dumps are Barrett’s fault. "Since being elected, he has dumped 8.2 billion gallons of raw sewage into Lake Michigan," Gilkes said. That’s a lot of flushing, so we decided to look into the claims. First the number. The Walker organization used media reports from the overflows going back to 2004 and tallied up what went untreated. We found Walker low-balled it. Had his campaign staff checked with MMSD - the totals are on the district’s website -- his people would have found that overflows actually totaled 10.4 billion gallons since 2004. Walker undershot the mark by 21percent. Walker spokeswoman Jill Bader said her staff assumed news reports, including figures from Milwaukee Journal Sentinel stories, were comprehensive. But by using different news accounts from different sources to tally up the figures, their number was off. For instance, in 2007, the Walker campaign didn’t use news reports from the Journal Sentinel at all, and in so doing missed nearly 400 million gallons of overflows. After being contacted by PolitiFact Wisconsin, she said the campaign staff had recently come across the district’s higher figures. Now, the discharges themselves. Is it raw sewage? That term sounds like it’s all coming from toilets. Actually, an estimated 95 percent is rainwater and runoff. Still, it’s untreated and therefore can be considered "raw." Finally, what about Barrett’s role in all of this? In a literal sense, he doesn’t have a hand in it. The city doesn’t operate Jones Island or the South Shore plant. The July decision to shut the gates to the deep tunnel system and start overflows was made by Kevin Shafer, MMSD’s executive director, in concert with his staff and Veolia Water North America, which operates the district’s waste water treatment system. Shafer said he made his first decision at about 6 p.m. on July 22 for the combined sewer system covering portions of Milwaukee and Shorewood and again at 1 a.m. the next day for the separated sewer system. It’s the same procedure for all overflows. "There is no contact with elected officials," Shafer said. "It’s purely an operational/technical decision that I make." But Barrett bears some responsibility. During his first campaign for mayor in 2004, Barrett was highly critical of MMSD and he vowed to fix the problem by demanding that the agency stop dumping raw sewage. "The Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District must clean up its act," Barrett said during the campaign. A Barrett radio ad lamented that MMSD the previous summer had "dumped 90,000 gallons of raw sewage into Lincoln Creek," which ultimately flows into the lake, and cited this as an example of the "outrageous failures of the district." As mayor, Barrett controls seven out of the 11 members of the MMSD board. He has the ability through his appointments to influence policy and procedures. The district plans to spend $1 billion by the end of the year to create new capacity and make other improvements to reduce overflows under a 2002 court-approved agreement between the DNR and MMSD. The new 27th Street tunnel project added 27 million gallons of capacity. A 7.1 mile long tunnel on the northwest side added 89 millions gallons of capacity. The entire storage system can store 521 million gallons until MMSD can process it. That means to handle the 2.1 billion gallons of overflow from the July storm, MMSD would need a system that is about four times larger. On the 27th Street tunnel project, the district said it spent $3 for every gallon of capacity. So if that cost held true, the price tag for an expansion able to handle 2.1 billion gallons would be about $6 billion. James Fratrick, a watershed specialist for the DNR, said that MMSD will never completely stop untreated waste from being released into Lake Michigan, and its state permit allows some emergency dumping to occur because zero discharge is not practical or required under federal law. "With rainfall events like this, it’s not economically feasible," Fratrick said. So there is some truth to Walker’s statement in that Barrett pledged he would stop the flows during the campaign and can influence the policies and procedures through his appointments to the board. But it’s an exaggeration to say that Barrett himself dumped the raw sewage into the lake after the extraordinary rainfall. We find the claim Barely True. Editor's note: This statement was rated Barely True when it was published. On July 27, 2011, we changed the name for the rating to Mostly False. | null | Scott Walker | null | null | null | 2010-09-03T13:36:45 | 2010-08-11 | ['Tom_Barrett_(politician)', 'Lake_Michigan'] |
pomt-12042 | Muslims’ disturbing plan comes out after grocery stores go bare to prepare for Irma. | mostly false | /punditfact/statements/2017/sep/12/freedom-daily/freedom-daily-misleads-about-potential-food-poison/ | A misleading headline from a website called Freedom Daily suggests that reports of potential food poisoning at grocery stores emerged after people stocked up in preparation for Hurricane Irma. "BREAKING: Muslims’ Disturbing Plan Comes Out After Grocery Stores Go Bare To Prepare For Irma," said the headline of an undated post on Freedomdaily.com Like a lot of fake news, the headline is extremely misleading while the text of the story itself is more accurate. The article summarizes and adds its own commentary to reports from the media and other sources about the Islamic State’s poisoning of prisoners and about the group’s followers potential to also poison Western grocery stores. In its About Us page, Freedom Daily said they "post and decipher content to a level that is consistent with a common sense approach and falls in line with the ideals of American liberty and freedom." Its Facebook page said the website "gives Americans the real news as it unfolds with a conservative opinion." In its story, the website doesn’t make any claims about active plots discovered against American supermarkets. "Multiple outlets have reported that ISIS is utilizing social media to instruct members to poison food in supermarkets. It may or may not happen, but the thought of it occurring on a widespread attack on groceries could be terrorizing," said the post about the grocery stores. "People could even entertain the thought of an ISIS attack before a hurricane in which the food is all poisoned and people falter in the midst of a category 4 storm before the storm even hits them. Of course, this is not something that has happened, but a mere idea or spectacle that theorists could allege." SITE Intelligence Group reported on Sept. 3 that potential terrorists were advised to inject food sold at markets with cyanide poison. SITE said that message was distributed Sept. 3 on a pro-Islamic State channel on the social media platform Telegram and that it was part of a series of information promoting "lone-wolf jihad in Western countries." Freedom Daily linked to a Sept. 6 story on The Federalist Papers Project based on SITE’s report. Newsweek also published a story Sept. 7 headlined, "ISIS supporters call for poisoning of food in grocery stores across U.S. and Europe." But neither of them say the information came after people emptied shelves at stores as they prepared for Hurricane Irma’s path across the Caribbean and Florida. Freedom Daily’s story uses a photo of a woman in a blue blouse pushing a shopping cart past empty shelves in a grocery store. That photo was shot on Sept. 5 at a Publix supermarket in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla. by the Palm Beach Post — two days after SITE’s report came out. The Miami Herald and several other outlets also reported on Sept. 5 about empty shelves at stores as Floridians prepared for Hurricane Irma. The New York Times on Sept. 4 also noted there were bare water shelves in Puerto Rico as they also braced for the storm. Freedom Daily’s story itself contains true information, but the headline ignores critical facts that would give a different impression. We rate it Mostly False. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com | null | Freedom Daily | null | null | null | 2017-09-12T08:01:39 | 2017-09-06 | ['None'] |
snes-00590 | Coconut water can be used as an intravenous substitute for blood plasma. | false | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/can-coconut-water-substitute-blood-plasma/ | null | Medical | null | Arturo Garcia | null | Can Coconut Water Be Used as a Substitute for Blood Plasma? | 10 May 2018 | null | ['None'] |
vees-00425 | VERA FILES FACT SHEET: At least how many laws are violated in the PNP’s secret jail cell? | none | http://verafiles.org/articles/vera-files-fact-sheet-least-how-many-laws-are-violated-pnps | No. | null | null | null | Philippine National Police,Human rights,Illegal detention,Secret jail | VERA FILES FACT SHEET: At least how many laws are violated in the PNP’s secret jail cell? | May 06, 2017 | null | ['None'] |
snes-00524 | Immigration authorities are taking rosaries away from immigrants at the border. | mostly true | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/are-rosaries-taken-immigrants-border/ | null | Politics | null | Bethania Palma | null | Are Rosaries Being Taken From Immigrants at the U.S.-Mexico Border? | 31 May 2018 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-15283 | I deployed the Texas National Guard to the Texas-Mexico border. "And the policy worked; apprehensions at the border declined 74 percent." | mostly false | /texas/statements/2015/jul/26/rick-perry/rick-perry-says-74-percent-drop-border-apprehensio/ | While declaring for president, Republican Rick Perry criticized President Barack Obama’s attitude toward securing the U.S.-Mexico border and suggested that in contrast, he’d shown he could slow illegal crossings of the Rio Grande. The former Texas governor, standing next to a plane like the one he flew as a young Air Force captain, said in his June 2015 speech: "When there was a crisis at our border last year, and the president refused my invitation to see that challenge that we faced, I told him, ‘Mr. President, if you do not secure this border, Texas will.’" "And because of that threat … posed by drug cartels … and transnational gangs," Perry continued, "I deployed the Texas National Guard. And the policy worked. Apprehensions at the border declined 74 percent. If you elect me your president, I will secure that border." Operation Strong Safety Perry was referring to Operation Strong Safety, the effort he launched on June 23, 2014, to place state troopers and, later, Texas National Guard troops along a portion of the 1,250-mile Texas part of the international border. Supporting the U.S. Border Patrol, the reinforcements were sent to secure the border by monitoring it. The Texas surge, so to speak, remained in place after Perry yielded the governorship to Greg Abbott in January 2015. When Perry acted, thousands of unaccompanied children, mostly from Central America, had lately been detained on the Texas side of the border. In the peak month, June 2014, the Border Patrol collected 10,622 unaccompanied children near the border, most of them in its more than 120-mile North-to-South Rio Grande Valley sector, which stretches west from Brownsville at the southern tip of the state to Falcon Village, 50 miles southeast of Laredo. Past Perry claims about the border have tickled the Truth-O-Meter. In June 2014, Perry said on the "Fox & Friends" program that the southern border was seeing a record number of non-Mexican apprehensions. True, we found. And in August 2014, Perry declared that record numbers of apprehensions were people from Pakistan, Afghanistan or Syria, places, he said, with "substantial terrorist ties." Pants on Fire! We found no evidence of record numbers of individuals from these countries crossing the Texas-Mexico border. For this fact check, we were curious about the described plummet in apprehensions and if that decrease showed the Texas surge worked. We dug into apprehension counts and hunted possible explanations. But first, it’s worth noting the U.S. government has struggled to define best indicators of the southern border’s security. Border security index announced, not completed A February 2015 report from the Bipartisan Policy Center, a nonpartisan Washington, D.C.-based think tank, said the best metric to judge the security of any border is "the number of successful unauthorized border-crossings," but admitted that it was impossible to pinpoint such a figure given that "by definition, they are undetected." A few years earlier, in 2010, the U.S. Border Patrol and Department of Homeland Security launched a project comprehensive border security metric. Later, the Border Patrol’s 2012 strategic report said the indicator, known as the Border Conditions Index, was still under development, but it would combine "important indicators of activity between the ports of entry; indicators of the amount, nature and flow of traffic at the ports of entry; and quality of life indicators in border communities." (The Border Patrol defines a "Port of Entry" as a location where officers are assigned to enforce the nation’s immigration laws.) In 2013, though, the government dropped the index project, according to a March 2013 New York Times news story, after more than two years of work did not give them a viable measurement because, as Border Patrol representative Mark Borkowski then told a congressional subcommittee, the index "would only show trends" but would not act as the end-all, be-all border security metric Congress had asked for. Omar Zamora, a Border Patrol spokesman based in the Rio Grande Valley sector, told us by phone that when the agency is judging the security of the border, officials first look at border apprehension and drug smuggling statistics, then take into account "bigger picture" figures like the economic health and crime rate of border towns versus comparable areas elsewhere in the state. Zamora said he personally hadn’t heard of the Border Conditions Index. Perry’s backup information Asked to elaborate on Perry’s 74-percent statement, his campaign spokeswoman, Lucy Nashed, said he relied on a report by the Texas Department of Public Safety showing apprehensions in the Border Patrol’s Rio Grande Valley sector during the Texas operation. By email, Nashed provided a fact-sheet of the report. Nashed, asked to elaborate, said the 74 percent figure aired by Perry reflected the difference in apprehensions the first week of the state operation to the last week Perry was in office, the week of Jan. 18, 2015. That week, there were 1,561 people apprehended, according to a chart on the fact sheet, 76 percent fewer than the 6,606 apprehensions in the week of June 22, 2014, when the operation started. Nashed said: "There’s actually a larger than 74 percent decrease in apprehensions, but it’s near enough that we feel saying 74 percent is still appropriate." SOURCE: Chart, "USBP Apprehension Trends in OSS Area of Responsibility (AOR) Zones," Texas Department of Public Safety, March 30, 2015 (received by email from Lucy Nashed, Rick Pery campaign, June 15, 2015) Broadly, the chart shows ups and (mostly) downs in weekly apprehensions in the sector of individuals attempting to enter Texas illegally from late June 2014 through Feb. 14, 2015. Summer Blackwell, a DPS spokeswoman, told us the chart was the latest available data at the time Perry announced for president. According to the chart, in the week of June 22-28, 2014, the start of Operation Strong Safety, the Border Patrol apprehended 6,606 individuals in the sector. But in the operation’s second week, the chart shows, apprehensions plummeted by more than a 1,000, a 22 percent decrease. In the operation’s sixth week, apprehensions were down 56 percent compared to the 6,606 apprehensions the first week, according to the chart. Apprehensions dropped, by varying degrees, every week until the week of Sept. 7, 2014, when apprehensions inched up from 1,976 to 1,997. From that week, apprehensions rose and fell within a limited range; from the first week of September to the last week of November, weekly apprehensions were never greater than 1,997 or less than 1,521. December 2014 and January 2015 brought the lowest weekly totals with the week including New Year’s Day showing the chart’s lowest total for the year, with 826 individuals apprehended. Past changes in apprehensions from summer to winter As we studied Perry’s claim, we wondered briefly about previous years. For instance, are there invariably fewer apprehensions in January compared to the previous June? Mostly so, at least in recent years. Per apprehension tallies for the sector, posted online by the Border Patrol, in four of the five pre-surge years, apprehensions in January ran at least 14 percent behind apprehensions the previous June. Outlier: Apprehensions in January 2012 outpaced apprehensions in June 2011 by 2 percent. On average, January apprehensions from 2010 through 2015 were down 52 percent from apprehensions the previous June. Then again, June 2014 was a watershed month for apprehensions. The 38,446 apprehensions exceeded the sector’s average for the five previous Junes by 30,349, or 375 percent. According to agency figures, the June 2014 tally was the highest monthly total of apprehensions for any border sector since 2008. Decreases after June 2014 There’s also no doubt apprehensions sunk in the months after Texas acted. According to Border Patrol figures, through the operation’s first seven months, there were 10,414 apprehensions a month. On average, then, apprehensions in each of the months were down 73 percent from June’s total of 38,446 -- the highest monthly total of any border sector since 2008. And did state law enforcement conclude the operation was successful due to the 74 percent difference cited by Perry? To that query, spokesmen gave nonspecific replies. By email, DPS spokesman Tom Vinger said: "It is clear that the surge operation directed by the Texas leadership to institute 24/7 saturation patrols on the Rio Grande River, the ground and in the air had a significant impact on the Mexican cartels’ ability to conduct successful smuggling operations along the border in the area of operation." To our queries, DPS didn’t provide data on the operation’s effects on smuggling. Previously, the Austin American-Statesman said in a May 2015 news story that according to records, the DPS had been involved in less than 10 percent of Rio Grande Valley drug seizures tallied by the federal government since the state operation began. At the time, Vinger responded that stressing contributions by any one agency to the overall successes wasn’t logical--akin to "trying to determine if a basketball team won a game by asking the point guard how many points he scored." At different times in 2014-15, the DPS described reductions in apprehensions as a key indicator of law enforcement success--and not much of one. In July 2014, DPS Director Steve McCraw told a Texas House committee a decline in border apprehensions would be "the best indicator across the board" to qualify the operation as a success. Yet in April 2015, the agency wrote legislators to play down declines in apprehensions. The letter from Robert Bodisch, a deputy director, warned lawmakers of "inaccurate and grossly misleading conclusions" in an expected American-Statesman news story on the border surge. The letter said "drug seizures and apprehensions are not a reliable means of accessing the level of security at the border." (See the May 4, 2015, news story, a look into how best to measure the operation’s success, here.) At the time, Bodisch wrote that there’s one way to measure the level of security of the border: "The only way to accurately assess the true level of security between the Ports of Entry is to be able to detect ALL smuggling events and determine whether each smuggling event was interdicted. Until you can detect and interdict all smuggling events between the Ports of Entry, the border will remain unsecured, regardless of the amount of drugs seized and people arrested." For our part, we also reached the Texas National Guard’s public affairs office. By email, an unnamed contact said by email that its 1,000 troops "amplified the visible presence on the ground and along the river to detect and prevent criminals from infiltrating the Texas-Mexico border and helping to ensure the safety of our fellow Texans." Separately, the Border Patrol’s Zamora declined to comment on the impact of the Texas surge on apprehensions, calling our question "too politically charged." Other analyses Seeking other looks into Perry’s 74 percent declaration, we spotted a February 2015 report by the left-leaning Washington Office on Latin America, an advocacy group focused on humanitarian missions in Central and South America. From October 2013 through September 2014, its report said, the Border Patrol reported its officers apprehended 49,959 unaccompanied children entering the Rio Grande Valley sector. From October 2014 through June 2015, the report said, far fewer minors — some 13,249 — were similarly apprehended, a decline of more than 25,000, or 59 percent. The report said the primary reason for the reduced apprehensions was, starting in July 2014, a crackdown by Mexico’s government on Central American immigrants. The references specifically to Perry surge were minimal, only mentioning the National Guard and DPS reinforcements that were sent to the border in the "Border Security in the Rio Grande Valley" subsection. The report, citing interviews with immigration experts from the Mexican government, said Mexico, acting at U.S. officials’ urging, "curtailed migrants’ longstanding use of cargo trains to travel north from points near the Guatemalan border and stepping up deportations of apprehended Central Americans." In May 2015, Factcheck.org, part of the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Center on Public Policy, similarly noted the Mexican government’s increased attention to Central Americans, citing an April 2015 news article in The Arizona Republic that quoted Border Patrol Chief Michael Fisher telling a Senate committee that the Border Patrol didn’t expect to see another surge in children crossing from Mexico because of the Mexican government’s crackdown. According to a report by the Mexican government footnoted in the Washington Office on Latin America report, there was a spike in Central Americans deported from Mexico in 2014 that coincided with the decrease in border apprehensions in the Rio Grande Valley. Specifically, the report by Mexico’s Instituto Nacional de Migración 2014 report, released in January 2015, said 67,097 individuals from the three Central American countries with the highest immigration totals -- Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador -- were deported in 2014 after that June, when the Texas operation took effect. In all of 2013, Mexico’s report said, 77,896 individuals from the aforementioned three Central American countries were deported by the Mexican government. To our inquiry, Tony Payan, director of the Mexico Center at Rice University’s Baker Institute of Public Policy, told us by email: "Establishing a real cause-effect on Texas' efforts to secure the border is frankly very hard, but I am inclined to say that they really add very little to the enormous federal government efforts in progress well before Texas intervened." In June 2014, according to the federal government, 115 Border Patrol officers were transferred to the Rio Grande Valley sector from other places. Later that month, the Department of Homeland Security announced the deployment of 150 additional Border Patrol agents to the sector. In July 2014, in addition, the Border Patrol announced an ad campaign in Central America, called the Danger Awareness Campaign, to warn potential immigrants about the dangers of crossing the Texas-Mexico border illegally. Our ruling Perry said: "I deployed the Texas National Guard" to the Texas-Mexico border. "And the policy worked; apprehensions at the border declined 74 percent." His statistic holds up, but Perry didn’t provide nor did we find proof the decrease resulted from the Texas surge. To be specific, Border Patrol apprehensions in the targeted part of the border region declined more than 70 percent through the second half of 2014. Unproven, however, is why that happened--and Perry’s statement crediting the Texas deployment ignored potentially substantive factors such as the Border Patrol staffing up, Mexico cracking down and, perhaps, a typical summer-to-winter flux. Proving the "policy worked" also is hindered by a lack of consensus on how to measure border security. This weakness similarly would apply, say, if President Barack Obama said the drop in apprehensions showed administration policies worked. We rate this statement Mostly False. MOSTLY FALSE – The statement contains an element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression. Click here for more on the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check. | null | Rick Perry | null | null | null | 2015-07-26T06:00:00 | 2015-06-04 | ['None'] |
tron-00121 | Hitler’s Slogan Was “Make Germany Great Again” | fiction! | https://www.truthorfiction.com/hitlers-slogan-make-germany-great/ | null | 9-11-attack | null | null | null | Hitler’s Slogan Was “Make Germany Great Again” | Mar 7, 2016 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-05191 | Giving the facts: 73,000 jobs created ... since '11. Do you know how many direct jobs in the auto industry? 1,800. | mostly true | /ohio/statements/2012/jun/13/john-kasich/john-kasich-downplays-role-auto-bailouts-ohios-eco/ | President Barack Obama and Ohio Gov. John Kasich share a common desire: they both think they can lay claim to Ohio’s gradually improving economic condition. But on this issue Kasich isn’t much in the sharing mood. Obama, a Democrat, is seeking re-election and likely will need to win Ohio in November to return to the White House. Kasich, a Republican, is backing GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney. Obama’s surrogates credit the president’s orchestrating of the automobile industry bailout in 2009 with helping to retain tens-of-thousands of Ohio jobs. But Kasich recently downplayed the role the $24.9 billion government boost for General Motors and Chrysler has played in Ohio to this point. During an appearance on NBC’s "Meet the Press," Kasich was asked why he wasn’t giving Obama’s bailout of the industry more credit for the job growth in Ohio. "Giving the facts: 73,000 jobs created ... since '11," he responded to host David Gregory. "Do you know how many direct jobs in the auto industry? 1,800." Kasich praised the resurgent strength of the auto industry in Ohio, but his intent was clear: diminish the role that job sector has had in Ohio under his administration by declaring that less than 2.5 percent of all jobs created here in the last 17 months were jobs in automobile manufacturing. He followed up by noting that the biggest areas of job growth are in business and financial services and medical fields. "See, what we have done in Ohio is we've diversified the economy so that we have multiple ways to grow jobs," he said. The auto industry is important to Ohio. The Center for Automotive Research ranks the state No. 2 for auto industry workers. So PolitiFact Ohio took a look at the governor’s claim. To PolitiFact Ohio, words matter. And the governor chose his words for this claim very carefully. Two key words in his statement are "created" (as opposed to "created or retained"), and "direct" as in jobs directly tied to making vehicles. That second distinction would exclude indirect jobs, such as those at restaurants and other businesses that benefit because of nearby automobile plants. This is an important distinction because Democrats regularly cite figures from a Center for Automotive Research report that claims in 2010 Ohio had just over 848,000 jobs tied to the automobile industry, of which about 150,000 are characterized as direct jobs. Many of those were jobs that were retained thanks to the automobile bailout even though Ohio, like other auto industry states, lost thousand of jobs in 2008 and 2009 which precipitated the bailout. Democrats have hailed the president for saving the industry and framed the conversation in terms of jobs saved and gradually returning. But Kasich was more restrictive in his phrasing, speaking only of direct jobs created. (That’s a departure from his the phrase "created and retained" that he often uses when talking about jobs in Ohio.) PolitiFact Ohio checked with Kasich’s staff about his claim. They cited figures from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. BLS counts motor vehicle manufacturing, motor vehicle parts manufacturing, and motor vehicle body and trailer manufacturing as direct jobs, according to BLS economist Parker Harvey. The BLS data shows Kasich’s stat was high. Between January 2011 and April 2012, Ohio had a net increase of 900 vehicle manufacturing jobs and net decrease of 200 parts manufacturing jobs for a total of 700 direct jobs. Also, through the third-quarter of 2011, the most recent figures available, Ohio was up about 400 body and trailer manufacturing jobs, according to BLS statistics. Add those together and you are still below 1,800. But the timeframe Kasich used is an issue in itself. In talking about Ohio jobs created by the auto bailout the governor only used job figures that covered his time in office. Kasich took office in January 2011. But the first federal aid to the automakers was made in 2008 while Republican President George W. Bush was still in office. It continued in early 2009 under Obama. Take any monthly snapshot you want in 2009 and compare it to when Kasich took office and you will see a significant net gain in vehicle manufacturing jobs. For example, in June 2009 Ohio had dropped to just 14,200 vehicle manufacturing jobs, down from 23,800 jobs just one year earlier. By the time Kasich took office that number had climbed back up to 19,200. That 5,000-job increase occurred after the auto bailouts, but isn’t reflected in the governor’s tally. And keep in mind, more jobs are coming to Ohio as the Chrysler and General Motors continued to rebound with the help of the bailout money. Chrysler is expected to add 1,100 more jobs by late summer or early fall to a plant in Toledo and GM recently announced that 100 temporary jobs at its plant in Lordstown will soon become permanent, full-time positions. Kasich’s claim is accurate. We’ll overlook that his 1,800 jobs figure is high since the BLS tally ultimately supports his point -- that job creation in Ohio’s economy is more diverse than just auto industry. But there’s additional information needed for clarification. By limiting the job creation numbers to just the time he has been in office, Kasich’s claim undersells the overall job growth that has occurred since the federal government rescued the auto industry. And his claim limited his figures to "direct" jobs that were "created." That does not reflect benefits to other businesses as a result of resurgence of auto employment or consider jobs that may have been retained. On the Truth-O-Meter, Kasich’s claim rates Mostly True. | null | John Kasich | null | null | null | 2012-06-13T06:00:00 | 2012-06-03 | ['None'] |
snes-00345 | Pictures of President Trump suffering a stroke are being used to spread a virus that wipes computers and cellphones. | false | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-suffering-stroke-virus-warning/ | null | Computers | null | David Mikkelson | null | ‘Trump Suffering from a Stroke’ Virus Warning | 15 July 2018 | null | ['None'] |
goop-02785 | Kanye West Stepping Away From Spotlight “Indefinitely,” | 3 | https://www.gossipcop.com/kanye-west-not-stepping-away-spotlight-indefinitely/ | null | null | null | Shari Weiss | null | Kanye West NOT Stepping Away From Spotlight “Indefinitely,” Despite Report | 10:12 am, May 19, 2017 | null | ['None'] |
para-00117 | The Labor government is "already a lower taxing government" than the previous Coalition government. | mostly true | http://pandora.nla.gov.au//pan/140601/20131209-1141/www.politifact.com.au/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/jul/10/penny-wong/labor-taxes-lower-costellos/index.html | null | ['Economy', 'Tax'] | Penny Wong | Alix Piatek, David Humphries | null | We're lower taxing than Howard and Costello: Wong | Wednesday, July 10, 2013 at 11:22 a.m. | null | ['Coalition_(Australia)', 'Australian_Labor_Party'] |
pose-01011 | Move aggressively on the municipal level to curb future pension costs, avoid protracted litigation, ensure employment stability, be fair to workers, older workers in particular, and honestly address all the critical issues facing the state with respect to pension benefits. | stalled | https://www.politifact.com/rhode-island/promises/linc-o-meter/promise/1089/reform-municipal-employee-pension-plans/ | null | linc-o-meter | Lincoln Chafee | null | null | Reform municipal employee pension plans | 2012-04-18T12:17:51 | null | ['None'] |
goop-01467 | Katy Perry’s Friends Want Her To Dump Orlando Bloom For Jake Gyllenhaal? | 0 | https://www.gossipcop.com/katy-perry-orlando-bloom-jake-gyllenhaal-dump-dating/ | null | null | null | Andrew Shuster | null | Katy Perry’s Friends Want Her To Dump Orlando Bloom For Jake Gyllenhaal? | 5:49 pm, March 1, 2018 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-00394 | Says Andrew Gillum has a "far left socialist platform." | false | /florida/statements/2018/sep/06/ron-desantis/no-floridas-andrew-gillum-not-socialist/ | In the race for Florida governor, Republican Ron DeSantis is trying to paint Democrat Andrew Gillum as so far out of the mainstream that Gillum "wants to turn Florida into Venezuela," a reference to the failing socialist country. "The last thing we need to do is to monkey this up by trying to embrace a socialist agenda with huge tax increases and bankrupting the state," DeSantis said on Fox News. DeSantis’ comments were more controversial because of his use of the phrase "monkey this up" (Gillum is African-American). DeSantis said his comments had nothing to do with race. "It had to do with his far-left socialist platform," DeSantis said in a subsequent interview on Laura Ingraham’s radio show. So, is Gillum’s platform far-left socialist? While there is a level of subjectivity in describing a politician’s political views, we can measure just how far left or out of the mainstream Gillum is. Gillum’s beliefs The DeSantis campaign said "Gillum’s socialism" includes his support for Medicare for All, which would provide health care to everyone. (A governor can’t change federal health care policy, but Gillum says he will champion it.) Gillum also proposed increasing the state corporate tax rate from 5.5 percent to 7.75 percent and the minimum wage from $8.25 to $15 an hour. DeSantis also points to Gillum’s endorsement by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who has called himself a socialist or a democratic socialist. (Gillum endorsed Hillary Clinton over Sanders in the 2016 presidential primary.) Gillum was asked during a 2018 primary forum if he is a socialist or a capitalist. "I am a Democrat and an individual in this state who believes that we've had a rough ride these last several years," Gillum said. "People are working, many of them harder than ever, and still can't bring down a wage where they can make ends meet." For Floridians who are struggling, he said, "these labels mean nothing." After he won the primary, MSNBC’s Chuck Todd asked Gillum if he is a socialist. This time, he rejected the socialist label outright. "No, I’m a Democrat. I ran as a Democrat, I am a Democrat. And, frankly, the values that I hold, I think, are consistent with the values of the Democratic Party. In fact, I think they are the values shared by the majority of Floridians." So what is socialism? The narrowest definition of socialism involves a state owning all businesses, with a ban on private economic activity above some level, said Daniel Shaviro, a tax law professor at New York University law school. But when Sanders uses the term, he is referring to the generous social insurance programs available not only in the Scandinavian countries but also France and Germany, along with high tax rates if needed. "But note that U.S. tax rates in the early 1960s exceeded 90 percent," Shaviro said. "Were we a ‘socialist’ country then? At the time, only the John Birch Society — not even Barry Goldwater — was saying so." We sent experts on political philosophy a list of Gillum’s policy positions. Experts generally told us that it’s misleading to state that Gillum has a "socialist platform" — he hasn’t advocated that the government control all forms of enterprise. If we examine socialism on a continuum, experts said some of Gillum’s policies are further from socialism and some are closer to it. Peter Dreier, a political science professor at Occidental College, said that for decades Republicans have used the "socialist" label to attack Democrats over policies including the New Deal in the 1930s and the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s. Many of the ideas that were once considered "socialist" — such as the minimum wage, women’s right to vote, and Social Security — are now mainstream. Back in the 1960s, when President Lyndon Johnson proposed Medicare, some Republican opponents called it "socialist." But now Americans overwhelmingly support Medicare. In Florida, about one in five people are on Medicare, among the highest rates in the country. Medicare for All would essentially expand an existing program, and some polls show a majority of Americans support Medicare for All. "Gillum is definitely not a socialist," Dreier said. "He is a mainstream liberal Democrat." Mac Stipanovich, a Florida Republican strategist and critic of President Donald Trump, said in an op-ed in the Tampa Bay Times that what Gillum wants is an expansion of Medicare, minimum wage and public education. But the programs themselves are broadly supported. "If supporting these socialist programs makes one a socialist, then Gillum is indeed a socialist, as is certainly almost every elected official in Florida, Democrats or Republicans," Stipanovich wrote. "A phone booth could not be filled with politicians of any stripe who oppose Medicare, any minimum wage at all, and public schools." Antony Davies, an economics professor at Duquesne University, said that Medicare fits the common definition of socialism because it is a program by which the government forces one group of people (wage earners) to pay for health insurance, and forces another group (retirees) to consume health insurance. "Thus, Medicare for All will have the government exerting even more control over people than it does under Medicare," he said. Measuring Gillum’s policies on a socialism spectrum So, broadly speaking, Gillum’s position of expanding health care access is rooted in the mainstream rather than the far left. So where might his positions shift toward something approximating socialism? Raising the corporate rate is closer to socialism, in the sense that you could say a 0 percent rate is the most "capitalistic" and a 100 percent rate the most "socialistic," Shaviro said. One could make a similar argument about the minimum wage too, but the minimum wage was far higher, relative to inflation, for most of the post-World War II period than it is now. And a majority of Americans have supported increasing the minimum wage. "The real point is that almost no one favors an absolutely pure market system with no government taxation or regulation, and no one in U.S. politics supports going 100 percent the other way, so we’re all just debating mixed systems and it’s not a matter of ‘socialists’ vs. ‘pro-capitalists.’" Eduardo A. Gamarra, a political science professor at Florida International University, said the comment by DeSantis that Gillum wants to turn Florida into Venezuela is "ludicrous." Venezuela has devolved because it mismanaged its oil resources. Florida has a more diversified economy that doesn’t rely on one product. "I don’t think Gillum is talking about nationalizing industries and taking over hotels," Gamarra said. "That’s just not going to happen." Our ruling DeSantis said Gillum has a "far left socialist platform." The reality is Gillum’s platform resembles the policies being promoted by many Democrats. And his positions of expanding access to Medicare and raising the minimum wage have significant public support. Gillum isn’t on the fringes of the political spectrum and certainly proposes nothing approaching turning "Florida into Venezuela," which would mean the state taking over privately held businesses and large portions of the economy. We rate this statement False. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com | null | Ron DeSantis | null | null | null | 2018-09-06T11:36:37 | 2018-08-30 | ['None'] |
pomt-10416 | Ten years ago, John McCain offered a bill that said he would ban a candidate from paying registered lobbyists. | true | /truth-o-meter/statements/2008/may/23/barack-obama/mccain-proposed-bill-that-didnt-pass/ | Special interests and lobbyists are perennial topics for political campaigns, and Sen. Barack Obama has made them a repeated target in his attacks on Sen. John McCain. "Ten years ago, John McCain offered a bill that said he would ban a candidate from paying registered lobbyists," Obama said. "He did this because he said that having lobbyists on your campaign was a conflict of interest. This is what he said 10 years ago. Well, I'll tell you John McCain then would be pretty disappointed with John McCain now, because he hired some of the biggest lobbyists in Washington to run his campaign. And when he was called on it, his top lobbyist had the nerve to say that the American people won't care about this." (We checked the statement about McCain hiring "some of the biggest lobbyists in Washington to run his campaign" and ruled it True. Also, we ruled it True that McCain's top lobbyist did have "the nerve to say that the American people won't care about this.") We delved into legislative history and found that McCain did introduce a bill, in 1996 and again in 1997, to ban lobbyists from being paid by political campaigns. The Lobbying Conflict of Interest Elimination Act said that "a candidate and the candidate's authorized committees shall not make disbursements for any services rendered by any individual during any period if such individual was required to register for such period as a lobbyist." McCain made remarks recorded in the Congressional Record about the bill on Jan. 22, 1997: "Registered lobbyists who work for campaigns as fundraisers clearly represent a conflict of interest. When a campaign employs an individual who also lobbies that member, the perception of undue and unfair influence is raised. This legislation would stop such practices." The bill never made it out of committee. It was part of a flurry of campaign finance reform legislation proposed in the aftermath of the 1996 campaign for president, during which Bill Clinton raised large amounts of "soft money," the unregulated gifts to political parties from individuals, corporations and unions. At least 57 pieces of legislation were filed in the spring of 1997, according to news reports from the time. One of those pieces of legislation included comprehensive reform banning soft money, sponsored by McCain and Sen. Russ Feingold, a Democrat from Wisconsin. The McCain-Feingold bill didn't succeed that year, but in 2002 it did pass and was signed into law by President Bush as the Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act. Though considered landmark legislation, it did not address lobbyists working for campaigns. Obama's description of McCain's legislation from a decade ago is accurate. We rule his statement True. For more on the other aspects of Obama's attack, see our story here. | null | Barack Obama | null | null | null | 2008-05-23T00:00:00 | 2008-05-21 | ['None'] |
pomt-06143 | [E]xcise tax increases drive commerce across state lines. | mostly true | /georgia/statements/2011/dec/21/grover-norquist/letter-warns-deal-taxes/ | Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal received a letter on Dec. 12 that likely gained the attention of his staff. The author was Grover Norquist, the president of the Washington-based Americans for Tax Reform, best known for the pledge he asks political candidates to sign vowing to oppose and vote against tax increases. Nearly one-half of the members of Congress, including nine from Georgia, have signed the pledge. During his successful 2010 campaign, Deal promised ATR that he would oppose and veto all tax increases as governor. Norquist, you see, has some pull. His letter to the governor urged Georgia lawmakers considering a tax overhaul next year to pass legislation that is revenue-neutral. Norquist also warned officials here to stay away from tax increases in other areas. A portion of one sentence caught our attention. "Last year’s target was tobacco; this year may be a repeat, or we may hear proposals for excise tax increases on alcohol or sweetened beverages," Norquist wrote. "Whatever the case may be, targeted excise tax increases drive commerce across state lines and hurt small businesses’ bottom lines." The question for us: Do excise tax increases, as Norquist wrote, "drive commerce across state lines"? Excise taxes are placed on items such as cigarettes and alcohol. Most excise taxes are on cigarettes. Georgia, like most Southern states, has among the lowest excise taxes on cigarettes (37 cents a pack) in the nation. One news report earlier this said state Senate leaders are considering raising the cigarette tax by $1 a pack. The Americans for Tax Reform staff argued its case that Norquist is right, pointing to the results of excise tax increases in three places, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and South Carolina. Here’s a closer look: Chicago ATR told us that Chicagoans flocked to neighboring Indiana when Cook County, which encompasses the Windy City, raised its cigarette tax by $1 in 2006. After the 2006 changes in Cook County, Chicagoans paid among the highest prices for cigarettes in the country. A team of University of Illinois-Chicago researchers found in a sample survey of discarded cigarette packs that 75 percent of them came from outside Cook County, The Huffington Post reported. The taxes on a pack of cigarettes in Chicago in 2007 was $4.05. The taxes were $1.37 outside city limits. Washington, D.C. ATR says Washington saw an 11 percent net decline in cigarette tax revenue after it raised the cigarette tax by 50 cents, to $2.50 a pack in 2009. Cigarette taxes in the nation’s capital were already higher than most states before 2009. In Virginia, the taxes for a pack of smokes is 30 cents, nearly the lowest in the nation. Missouri has the lowest cigarette taxes, 17 cents a pack, according to the Campaign for Tobacco-free Kids. City officials still expected to bank $30 million from the increase, although it was less than their initial projection of about $45 million. South Carolina Georgia saw a net increase in cigarette sales of nearly 1.3 million packs in the six months after South Carolina raised its excise tax rate in July 2010, ATR says. Cigarette tax revenue did decline slightly in South Carolina in the first 12 months since its increase, records show. South Carolina previously had the lowest cigarette tax in the nation, at 7 cents a pack. It’s now 57 cents a pack. Many smokers in the Palmetto State were not happy with the changes. Matthew Farrelly, whose research on cigarette excise taxes has been used by others, said some people will travel across state lines to buy cigarettes once excise taxes are raised. Other smokers will buy by the carton or choose a lesser brand to save money, he said. Farrelly contends it’s "bogus" for anyone to say large numbers of smokers will rush to another state to buy cigarettes once an increase takes effect because few Americans live near a border. He also noted the states that raise their excise taxes eventually make a profit. "On net, increases in taxes on cigarettes lead to revenue all the time," said Farrelly, senior director, RTI International Public Healthy Policy Research Program, headquartered near Raleigh, N.C. Our conclusion: Norquist has a good argument for his basic point, based on the research we’ve seen and people we’ve interviewed. The difference in taxes between some places, however, is so large ($2.20 a pack between Washington, D.C., and Virginia) that it adds some important context to this argument. With that additional bit of information, we rate Norquist’s claim as Mostly True. | null | Grover Norquist | null | null | null | 2011-12-21T06:00:00 | 2011-12-12 | ['None'] |
snes-05784 | Alex Malarkey, protagonist of the book The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven: A True Story, actually visited Heaven. | false | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/heaven-dissent/ | null | Uncategorized | null | Kim LaCapria | null | The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven | 15 January 2015 | null | ['Heaven'] |
pomt-10163 | Says that under his tax plan, seniors making less than $50,000 per year won't pay any income taxes. | true | /truth-o-meter/statements/2008/sep/30/barack-obama/seniors-get-a-special-break/ | In a new 2-minute TV ad, Barack Obama explains his economic plans and contrasts them with John McCain's. In two other Truth-O-Meter rulings, we examined Obama's claims about his plans for small businesses and the middle class. Here, we'll address his plan for senior citizens. He says in the ad that "seniors making less than $50,000, who are struggling with the rising costs of food and drugs on fixed incomes, won’t pay income taxes at all." That is correct. Obama's tax plan specifies that he would "eliminate all income taxation of seniors making less than $50,000 per year." The campaign estimates it will cut taxes an average of $1,400 for 7-million seniors. It's worth noting that Obama's proposal has been criticized on several fronts. Some economists have questioned whether it's a wise policy because seniors already receive favorable tax treatment. The Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan tax research group, said Obama's plan would create inequity by eliminating taxes for senior citizens who earn a modest income but continuing to tax younger workers earning the same amount. Also, it would help seniors who are currently paying income taxes but provide no benefit for those too poor to owe any tax. Still, Obama accurately describes his plan in the ad. We rate his statement True. | null | Barack Obama | null | null | null | 2008-09-30T00:00:00 | 2008-09-30 | ['None'] |
pomt-12826 | In the United States, "we tax our exports and don't tax our imports." | half-true | /wisconsin/statements/2017/feb/09/paul-ryan/does-united-states-tax-exports-not-imports/ | A couple of weeks after former Fox News Channel talk show host Greta Van Susteren started a program on MSNBC, the Appleton, Wis. native welcomed U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan to discuss what changes could be expected under President Donald Trump. When Van Susteren asked Ryan in the Jan. 25, 2017 interview about the "tax code" (which Ryan has errantly claimed hasn’t been updated in 30 years), the Janesville, Wis., Republican emphasized the need to reduce business tax rates (which Trump has accurately characterized as high). Then Ryan said: "Oh, and by the way, here's what the rest of the world does that we don't do: They take the tax off of their exports and place a tax on their imports. We do the opposite. We tax our exports and don't tax our imports. So, we're putting ourselves -- we’re basically double taxing made-in-America products." Does the United States tax exports but not tax imports? Both parts of the speaker’s claim, said Joel Trachtman, professor of international law at the Fletcher School at Tufts University in Massachusetts, are "in principle true, but there’s a lot of important exceptions." The backdrop Taxes on imports and exports are important given that Trump has been highly critical of America’s trade policies. Three days after his inauguration, he signed a presidential memorandum officially directing the United States to withdraw from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the biggest trade deal struck in two decades. That earned him a Promise Kept on PolitiFact National’s Trump-O-Meter. Now to the first part of Ryan’s two-part claim. ‘We tax our exports’ There is no excise tax or tariff applied by the United States on goods sold to foreign customers. But Ryan’s point is that U.S. businesses pay income taxes on their worldwide income -- that is, from exports as well as goods sold within the United States. It’s worth noting, though, that multinational companies are often able to reduce or delay their payment of U.S. taxes on export-based income. And U.S. exporters also enjoy subsidies and other assistance from some 20 federal agencies. So, the first part of the statement is mostly on target. We ‘don’t tax our imports’ Ryan’s point here is that a foreign company that sells goods from abroad into the United States does not pay any U.S. income taxes unless it has subsidiaries based in the United States or branches in the United States. For example, Toyota USA pays income taxes on cars made in Japan that it buys and resells to U.S. consumers. But his statement ignores the existence of tariffs -- another form of tax that is imposed on many goods as they come into the United States. On average, the tariff imposed at the border is 1.5 percent, according to a March 2016 report from the U.S. International Trade Commission. (Tariffs are aimed at making American companies more competitive with their foreign counterparts, but consumer costs in the United States almost certainly would rise if tariffs are increased. Trump has promised to raise tariffs on "any country that devalues their currency to take unfair advantage of the United States.") Ryan’s office acknowledged to us that tariffs are another form of tax, but pointed out that he had been asked about the tax code, which is administered by the Internal Revenue Service rather than the U.S. Customs and Border Protection. So, the second part of the claim is misleading in that there are no direct taxes on imports, but there are tariffs. Our rating Ryan said: In the United States, "we tax our exports and don't tax our imports." On the export side, the United States doesn’t have an excise tax or tariffs on goods sold to foreign customers. But U.S. businesses do pay income taxes on their exports -- though multinational companies have the means to mitigate those taxes. On the import side, foreign companies don’t pay income taxes on goods they sell to the United States, but tariffs -- another form of tax -- are imposed on many imported goods. For a statement that is partially accurate but leaves out important details, our rating is Half True. Share the Facts Politifact 2 6 Politifact Rating: In the United States, "we tax our exports and don't tax our imports." Paul Ryan U.S. House speaker, R-Wis. In an interview Wednesday, January 25, 2017 01/25/2017 Read More info | null | Paul Ryan | null | null | null | 2017-02-09T05:00:00 | 2017-01-25 | ['United_States'] |
pomt-12493 | The estimated price of President Trump’s border wall is the same as the cost of "one and a half aircraft carriers." | true | /california/statements/2017/apr/28/scott-peters/would-trumps-border-wall-cost-same-one-and-half-us/ | The debate over President Trump’s proposed border wall intensified this week, with opponents saying the barrier would be ineffective and a costly mistake. Building "a big, beautiful wall" on the Southern border was Trump’s signature promise during his campaign, winning him support from advocates for hard-line immigration reform. But when Trump initially demanded funding for the wall be included in a stop-gap budget measure needed to avoid a government shutdown, opponents in Congress balked. Rep. Scott Peters, D-San Diego, said the billions needed to build the wall should be used elsewhere. Peters went on to make an eye-opening claim about what money for the wall could fund instead: "We’ve checked in with The Navy; if we don’t pass the 2017 budget, they’re talking here about five ships that won’t be available to sail just out of the Western region — and 15 worldwide...the money for the wall? That’s, by the way, (the cost of) one and a half aircraft carriers," Peters was quoted as saying on April 24, 2017 in a Politico news article. We know cost estimates for the wall are high. But would the price really equate to "one and a half aircraft carriers"? We set sail on a fact check. Paying for a "big, beautiful wall" The U.S. border with Mexico is nearly 2,000 miles long. It already includes about 650 miles of fencing constructed under previous administrations. Trump has said the wall doesn’t need to span the entire border, adding in a television interview that "We don’t need 2,000 (miles), we need 1,000 because we have natural barriers." During his campaign, Trump initially said he could build a wall for $4 billion and later estimated $6 billion to $7 billion. In April 2017, he put it at $10 billion or less. The Associated Press reported in March that the Trump Administration wants to build a 30-foot-high border wall that "looks good from the north side and is difficult to climb or cut through," according to a pair of contract notices posted to a government website. A drone's view of the US-Mexico border fence as seen from Nogales, Mexico, Sunday, April 2, 2017. (Brian Skoloff / AP) Cost estimates for the wall vary greatly. Here are some relevant estimates, as chronicled by news publication Quartz. In July 2016, Bernstein Research, a firm that analyzes material costs, put the price tag at $15 billion to $25 billion, for a wall that stretches 1,000 miles and is 40 feet high, which was Trump’s initial desired height. In January 2017, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell said the wall would be $12 billion to $15 billion. In February 2017, a leaked report from the Department of Homeland Security put it much higher, at $21.6 billion. In April 2017, the Democratic staff of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee said in a report that costs could soar to nearly $70 billion — not including the significant costs and legal resources required for land acquisition. Peters’ spokesman Jacob Peters said the congressman used the $21.6 billion estimate because it "comes from the internal report done by the Department of Homeland Security." "This estimate falls somewhere in the middle of the range of cost estimates," the spokesman added. "Because this report was commissioned by (Department of Homeland Security) Secretary Kelly, and is based on the Trump administration’s own planning process to build walls and fences to cover almost the entirety of the border that is not already fenced, it is the best current estimate for what President Trump is likely to ask Congress to appropriate to build his border wall." We also used the $21.6 billion as our estimate. Aircraft carrier cost Finding the cost of the latest U.S. aircraft carrier is a bit easier. Peters’ spokesman pointed to a Congressional Research Service report from April 2017 that places the cost of each new "Navy Ford Class Aircraft Carrier" at approximately $12.9 billion. That’s up from the $8.5 billion cost of carriers in the Navy’s most-recent Nimitz class, according to a Navy fact sheet. The first carrier in the new class, the USS Gerald R. Ford, is expected to be commissioned later in 2017. It’s been described as "the most expensive and most advanced warship ever built." Still, when we do the math, it appears Peters slightly underestimated his comparison: Building a $21.6 billion border wall would cost about 1.67 times the price of these new warships. We asked Lynn Reaser, chief economist at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego to examine the cost figures. Reaser told us the number "does appear to check out." Our ruling Democratic Congressman Scott Peters recently claimed the estimated price of President Trump’s border wall is the same as the cost of "one and a half aircraft carriers." Peters used a $21.6 billion estimate, citing a leaked report from the Trump Administration’s Department of Homeland Security. That figure is within the $15 billion to $25 billion range produced by a private research firm. Peters referenced the $12.9 billion price tag on the Navy’s newest class of aircraft carriers from a Congressional Research Service report. At this early stage, no one knows how much Trump’s wall will really cost. Partisan sources have it all over the map. And delays and cost-overruns are common for large government projects: Just take a look at California’s massive high-speed rail initiative. But Peters selected what appears to be the best initial estimate from Trump’s own homeland security analysts. If anything, Peters slightly underestimates the 1.67 aircraft carriers the U.S. could build for the cost of Trump’s border wall. We rate Congressman Peters' claim True. TRUE – The statement is accurate and there’s nothing significant missing. Click here for more on the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com | null | Scott Peters | null | null | null | 2017-04-28T15:53:42 | 2017-04-24 | ['None'] |
pomt-01393 | The U.S. Supreme Court struck down Wisconsin's photo ID election law | false | /wisconsin/statements/2014/oct/14/debbie-wasserman-schultz/wasserman-schultz-says-states-id-law-struck-down/ | Separate judicial rulings in Wisconsin and Texas on Oct. 9, 2014 gave cheer to opponents of state laws requiring voters to show photo ID at the polls. Here’s part of what the Democratic National Committee chairwoman, U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, had to say in a statement: "With less than ten days before early voting starts in Texas and Wisconsin, I am pleased with the judicial decisions yesterday striking down burdensome photo ID laws in those states." Did the brief Supreme Court order "strike down" the Wisconsin statute? The DNC leader was in a minority in using that terminology, we found in reviewing media reports and reactions from legal and political observers. But the New York Times’ headline on its story may have influenced some -- and in fact a DNC spokesman pointed it out to us in providing backup for Wasserman Schultz’s claim. "Courts Strike Down Voter ID laws in Wisconsin and Texas," the paper’s online headline declared Oct. 9, 2014. The story beneath that headline, though, used "struck down" only when referring to the Texas ruling. Here’s what it said about Wisconsin: "The Supreme Court on Thursday evening stopped officials in Wisconsin from requiring voters there to provide photo identification before casting their ballots in the coming election." There’s a significant difference between the rulings in the two states. In Texas, a federal district court judge -- the lowest level in the federal system -- found that state’s ID law unconstitutional, writing that it intentionally discriminates against black and Hispanic voters. The Wisconsin case is much further along: The action Wasserman Schultz reacted to was from the U.S. Supreme Court. In April 2014, Federal District Court Judge Lynn Adelman "struck down" Wisconsin’s law, but the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals found it sound and cleared the way for its use in the Nov. 4, 2014 election. Several groups then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. The high court in its Oct. 9 action did not take up the merits of the Wisconsin law’s constitutionality or even decide whether to take the case at all. Instead, without comment from the majority in the 6-3 decision, it temporarily blocked the implementation of the law, perhaps in response to plaintiffs’ claims that it was too close to the Nov. 4, 2014 election to be properly implemented. Underscoring the limited and temporary nature of the ruling, two justices who supported upholding Indiana’s voter ID law in a 2008 ruling -- Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Anthony Kennedy -- voted in the Wisconsin case to block the law for now. Most media outlets, legal observers and participants in the case used terms like "blocked" or "stayed" to describe the impact of the Wisconsin ruling. The DNC told us there’s only a semantic difference between "struck down" and "blocked." We heard otherwise. "It’s not accurate to say it was ‘struck down,’ but it’s understandable" given the New York Times headline and other media coverage, said Daniel P. Tokaji, an Ohio State University law professor and expert on election law. Non-lawyers especially can be forgiven for using the term, he said. "The Supreme Court did not ‘strike down’ the voter ID law," Wisconsin Department of Justice spokeswoman Dana Brueck told us. "It vacated the Seventh Circuit’s September 12th order staying the District Court’s injunction." She added: "The September 12th order from the Seventh Circuit permitted Wisconsin to enforce the voter ID law in November. The Supreme Court did not take any action whatsoever as to the merits of the voter ID law." Wisconsin Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen is exploring ways to reinstate the law before the November election. We asked a lawyer for one of the groups that sought the stay to weigh in on this. Larry Dupuis, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Wisconsin Foundation, said he wouldn’t use "struck down." But he added that there is no technical legal definition of "struck down, "so I suppose someone could say the law was ‘struck down’ temporarily or for the November election." The DNC told us Wasserman Schultz’s statement was "consistent with news accounts and had one goal: to communicate clearly to voters that the United State Supreme Court’s action meant that the Wisconsin photo ID law would not be applicable in this year’s election." We tackled a somewhat similar claim when Gov. Scott Walker said the John Doe investigation into his campaign finances had been "resolved" after two judges ruled it was "over." We rated that claim False, since it was not final and more court action lay ahead. Indeed, the federal appeals court overturned the lower-court decision and sent it back to a Wisconsin court, where an earlier action halting it remains under appeal. Our rating Wasserman Schultz said the Supreme Court struck down Wisconsin's photo ID election law. The high court temporarily halted the law from going into effect but did not take any action on the viability of the law itself. The ultimate fate of the law is yet to be determined. We rate her claim False. | null | Debbie Wasserman Schultz | null | null | null | 2014-10-14T05:00:00 | 2014-10-10 | ['Wisconsin'] |
pomt-05849 | We aren't the only state cutting back on public television. | true | /rhode-island/statements/2012/feb/14/richard-licht/rhode-island-director-administration-richard-licht/ | The prospect of clipping the wings of Big Bird came up Feb. 5 when Richard Licht, Governor Chafee’s director of administration, made an appearance on ABC6’s "On the Record with Buddy Cianci." The host, former Providence Mayor Vincent "Buddy" Cianci was grilling Licht on Chafee’s proposal to eliminate funding for Channel 36, now known as Rhode Island PBS, the state’s only public television station. Chafee's proposed budget, crafted to close a projected shortfall of $120 million to $125 million, would cut off funding to the station after Dec. 31, 2012. CIANCI: "What have you got against 'Sesame Street'?" LICHT: "I love Sesame Street. I have grandchildren and I always watched it with all four of my children. Tough times make for tough choices." CIANCI: "But 'Sesame Street'? My God." LICHT: "Hopefully, Channel 36 will be aggressive, go out and find some good charitable sponsors to help support this." CIANCI (facetiously): "Especially in this economy, they're going to just fork over $800,000." LICHT: "We aren't the only state cutting back on public television. It's not anything that we're happy about and, again, that's something that might be reversed [if better higher revenue estimates come in], but the facts are, tough times, tough choices." We were interested in whether Licht was correct that other states are cutting back on public television and, if so, how many. We called the governor's office to ask for Licht's source. Meanwhile, we talked to David Piccerelli, president of Rhode Island PBS. "The proposal is to fund us through December 31 of 2012 and then shut off funding altogether," he said. In the current fiscal year, the state contributes $922,000 to RIPBS's total budget of $2.9 million. That's 31 percent. Another 27 percent comes from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which helps fund stations throughout the United States. (The CPB itself has been repeatedly threatened with the cutoff of federal funds by conservatives.) The remaining 42 percent comes from fundraising. Piccerelli said about 85 cents out of every dollar raised is from individual donors. Corporate support accounts for no more than 15 cents, down from close to 30 cents on the dollar around 2004-2005, before the Rhode Island economy took a faceplant. Piccerelli said some states HAVE been cutting back their support; Chafee's office sent us information confirming that. Last June, New Hampshire Public Television eliminated 20 full-time workers and cut staff salaries by as much as 10 percent after it lost $2.7 million in state funding, or about 30 percent of its budget. At the same time, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, backed by the state legislature, eliminated funding for New Jersey public television, which resulted in the 40-year-old New Jersey Network being taken over by WNET in New York and NJN's nine radio licenses being sold to stations in New York and Philadelphia. Stacey Karp, director of communications for the Association of Public Television Stations, said four other states -- Florida, Missouri, Pennsylvania and South Carolina -- have also eliminated funding. For details, she sent us to Skip Hinton, president of the National Educational Telecommunications Association, a professional association that represents stations in every state. He told us that 38 states were providing direct support to public broadcasting in 2007. It's now down to 32. Of the 32, "most have seen pretty significant reductions in state funding over the last four years," he said. At least one state -- Illinois -- increased its contribution to public television, boosting funding by 16 percent last year, following cuts in previous years. Our ruling Richard Licht, Chafee's director of administration, said, "We aren't the only state cutting back on public television." Turns out, he’s right. Five states have eliminated funding and others have cut their contributions. We rate his statement True. (Get updates from PolitiFactRI on Twitter. To comment or offer your ruling, visit us on our PolitiFact Rhode Island Facebook page.) | null | Richard Licht | null | null | null | 2012-02-14T00:01:00 | 2012-02-05 | ['None'] |
pomt-06486 | Says Rick Perry increased spending in Texas by more than 50 percent. | half-true | /texas/statements/2011/oct/14/michele-bachmann/michele-bachmann-says-texas-spending-increased-mor/ | When the Bloomberg/Washington Post debate on economic topics gave GOP hopefuls the chance to question another candidate directly, U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota turned to Rick Perry. She declared that after Perry backed Al Gore for president as Ronald Reagan’s presidency came to its close, he "went on to increase spending in Texas by over 50 percent" as governor. Bachmann incorrectly said Perry was Gore’s campaign co-chair, which we’ve covered in another fact check. Her reference to state spending on the Texas governor's watch also covered familiar turf. In an online ad we spotted last month, the pro-Bachmann Keep Conservatives United super PAC said Perry had "doubled state spending in a decade." We found that to be Mostly False. Not that spending didn’t increase. In August 2010, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Bill White cited state budget figures to show that overall state spending had increased 79 percent with Perry as governor, from nearly $101.8 billion in 2000-01 to almost $182.2 billion in 2010-11. At the time we took up the pro-Bachmann group’s claim, an updated spending tabulation indicated the increase had been 86 percent. However, we recognized that this percentage was both unadjusted for inflation and population increases and that it reflected spending from all sources, including federal aid. Taking into account inflation and population growth, the increase was 21 percent over the period. And budgeted expenditures drawing on state general revenue -- the kind most swayed by a governor -- increased 44 percent without adjustments, but decreased 6 percent once inflation and population growth are weighed. We did not hear back from Bachmann on the basis of her debate claim. Our sense is that Bachmann’s assessment of "over 50 percent" misstates overall spending on Perry’s watch, especially because it doesn’t appear to include any accounting for the state’s growth or inflation. The claim also overstates the raw increase in general-revenue spending, the kind that Perry had the most control over. We rate her statement Half True. | null | Michele Bachmann | null | null | null | 2011-10-14T17:59:27 | 2011-10-11 | ['Texas', 'Rick_Perry'] |
pomt-01386 | Four million women have fallen into poverty in the last six years. | mostly false | /georgia/statements/2014/oct/15/david-perdue/perdue-claim-mark/ | A key strategy for Republicans running in this year’s midterm elections has been to slam their Democratic opponents as surrogates of President Barack Obama. It’s a tactic that GOP nominee David Perdue has employed repeatedly in Georgia’s closely watched U.S Senate race, including last week when he and Democratic opponent Michelle Nunn shared the debate stage in Perry. When asked about his stance on minimum wage and how to create jobs, Perdue told a huge and at times raucous crowd that Nunn was trying to "tear down" his business career to detract from her support of Obama. "She supports the economic policies of this administration, one that put 4 million women in poverty in six years," Perdue said. Other Republicans have made similar claims this year as both parties vie for the female vote and control of the U.S. Senate. We decided to pull out the Truth-O-Meter to check: Have 4 million women really fallen into poverty in the last six years? We began by asking Perdue’s camp for its evidence. Spokesman Derrick Dickey said Perdue’s comments relied, in part, on an August 2014 post on the Georgia Federation of Republican Women’s website. The post stated that nearly 4 million women had fallen into poverty since Obama was elected in 2008. The campaign also was drawing on similar public comments by U.S. Sens. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Ted Cruz of Texas, though both McConnell and Cruz used slightly smaller estimates of 3.7 million, Dickey said. We reached out to the staff of both senators and heard back immediately from Don Stewart from McConnell’s office. Stewart pointed us to data from the U.S. Census Bureau (table 7) showing that there were 22.131 million females living below the poverty line in 2008, the year President Obama was elected, and 25.840 million in poverty in 2012. That is an increase of 3.7 million (over five years, not six as Perdue said). But that data counts all females -- including children -- which is not what most people think of or how Merriam-Webster defines women. Among women 18 and over - the ones in those jobs Perdue was discussing in the debate - the poverty rate went up by 2.8 million between 2008 and 2013, according to Census figures. Looking at the data starting in 2009, when Obama took office and could affect policy, the increase drops to 1.5 million, Census data show. Two facts missing from those numbers further complicate the data, according to William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution. One: the number of all women increased in those periods due to population growth. That "accounts for most of the increase in poverty in women over either the 2008-2013 or 2009-2013," Frey said. Two: The Great Recession ticked up the poverty rate for everyone, not just women, between 2010 and 2012. Last year, the poverty rate went down overall for the first time since 2006, before Obama took office. For working-age women, those between 18 and 64, there was a rise in the poverty among adult women of about 991,000 between 2009 and 2013. The Census Bureau calls those figures "statistically insignificant." So where does this leave us? Perdue last week said Michelle Nunn "supports the economic policies of this administration, one that put 4 million women in poverty in six years." He bases it, in part, on U.S. Census Bureau data first collected in 2008, when Obama wasn’t even in office. The Census Bureau data shows 3.7 million more females in poverty in 2012 than in 2008. But when you talk just about women -- adult females over 18 -- the increase is 2.8 million. That’s far too big an increase but also far too far from 4 million to be called accurate. We rate the statement Mostly False. | null | David Perdue | null | null | null | 2014-10-15T00:00:00 | 2014-10-07 | ['None'] |
pomt-09405 | For years now, we have spent more money than we have taken in. | half-true | /texas/statements/2010/mar/21/annise-parker/annise-parker-says-years-houston-has-been-spending/ | With the city of Houston running short about $11 million to fund its budget this year and projecting a revenue shortfall of $100 million for next year — Houston's first-year mayor, Annise Parker, recently floated the possibility of furloughs and layoffs for city employees. "For years now (in Houston), we have spent more money than we have taken in," Parker said March 10, according to a news article in The Houston Chronicle. "You can't spend more than you earn. It is a very unbusinesslike approach to running things." The Bayou City running in the red for years? We wondered if Parker, who was Houston's controller before she took office in January, has that right — especially because her predecessor as mayor, Bill White, touted his financial acumen while winning the 2010 Democratic nomination for governor. Janice Evans, Parker's director of communications, told us: "The city has offset revenue shortfalls in recent years by drawing down the (general) fund balance, which was built up in good times so that it would be available during leaner times." She was referring to the city's practice of socking away enough money so that the fund balance at the end of each fiscal year is equal to 7.5 percent of expenditures before debt service — essentially a savings account, which was built up over eight consecutive years. Michelle Mitchell, the city's finance director, said that starting in fiscal year 2009 — July 1, 2008 through June 30, 2009 — revenue coming into the general fund has fallen short of expenditures. The general fund, which is the government's largest kitty, helps supports most basic services including health and human services, the police force and the fire department. "General revenues such as property tax, sales tax, came in lower than expenditures," Mitchell acknowledged in an e-mail. But she cautioned that "there are other sources of funds that have to be looked at for the whole picture. These include funds such as sale of assets, proceeds from bonds, transfers from other fund sources, etc. With all revenues being considered, then the city did not outspend (its) revenues (prior to fiscal year 2009)." Judy Gray Johnson, who served as Houston's finance director from 2004-2008, agreed with Mitchell's summary. "If you have higher fund balances at the end of the year than you had at the beginning of the year, than you couldn't have spent more than you took in," Johnson said. When White became mayor in 2004, the undesignated fund balance — money saved — was $83 million. The city last added to the fund in fiscal year 2008 which ended June 30 of that year. At that time the balance was about $287.2 million, according to the city's annual audited financial reports. In fiscal year 2009, there wasn't any extra cash to add to the general fund kitty. In fact, Houston's charter requires the city to keep a balanced budget, and for the past two years, the city has relied in part on reserve funds to satisfy the requirement. The city drew $26 million from the undesignated fund in fiscal 2009, lowering the balance to $261.1 million by June, 2009. Mitchell has projected the balance will drop to about $166 million by June 30 this year. Summing up: Houston took in more money than it spent for most of White's six-year tenure as mayor, and socked some of it away. Since fiscal 2009, the city has been drawing on those reserve funds, ending each year with less than it started. So far, it has drawn $56 million from the fund. Parker is correct that the city has spent more than it's taken in for years, though her time reference works only because the city's fiscal year always includes portions of two calendar years — in this case, 2008 and 2009. Put another way, the city has taken in less than it’s spent for about a year and a half, which includes one complete fiscal year and part of the current one. We rate Parker's statement as Half True. | null | Annise Parker | null | null | null | 2010-03-21T17:28:48 | 2010-03-10 | ['None'] |
pomt-13033 | Texans pay the sixth-highest property tax in the nation. | mostly true | /texas/statements/2016/dec/01/dan-patrick/dan-patrick-mostly-right-texans-pay-nations-sixth-/ | After Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick saluted legislation potentially giving voters more sway over local property taxes, we wondered afresh about how Texas ranks nationally in terms of property tax burden. Patrick, talking up a proposal hatched by fellow Republicans led by Houston state Sen. Paul Bettencourt, said in a Nov. 29, 2016, press release: "Texans pay the sixth-highest property tax in the nation, and Texans have told us loud and clear that common-sense property tax reform legislation is long overdue." In January 2016, we found Mostly True the same claim by a Bexar County legislative aspirant. The business-oriented Tax Foundation, a national group, drew on 2013 Census Bureau data to map the average amount of residential property tax paid as a percentage of home value state by state. By that metric, the Texas rate of 1.9 percent proved higher than the rates in 44 states; it was topped by the rates for Wisconsin, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Illinois and No. 1 New Jersey at 2.38 percent. Still, we noted, property taxes in Texas are levied locally in Texas, resulting in ample differences in the burden depending on where taxpayers live. Rankings yet to be updated Not a lot has changed since we reached that conclusion. For starters, the rankings — showing Texas with the sixth highest "mean effective property tax rate on owner-occupied housing" — haven’t been updated, the foundation’s Jared Walczak said to our inquiry. Yet, Walczak also told us by email, "this does not make Texas a high-tax state. Texas has chosen to rely more heavily on property taxes, and less heavily on other taxes, than many peer states, foregoing some altogether. The state's tax structure is an important part of its economic success, and it is inevitable that, when a state foregoes an individual income tax, some other tax will be somewhat higher than it might otherwise have been." In fact, the foundation has previously reported that in 2012 Texas ranked 46th in state-local taxes per resident. Why property taxes can be high Property taxes might be higher here because unlike most states, Texas levies no state income tax. Notably too, unlike in some states, Texas’ property tax rates are set locally, not by the state, according to the Texas state comptroller, with government units spending the revenue to provide local services including schools, streets and roads, police and fire protection and many others. Moreover, the state lacks the constitutional authority to levy a property tax, as the Texas Legislative Council noted in a 2002 overview of local taxes statewide. Generally under the current system, a county appraisal district does an annual property valuation, then each area city, county, school and special district (like hospital and road districts) sets the respective tax rate necessary to raise the money needed to fund the related adopted budget. And according to Census data, property taxes in 2013, the latest year of available data, were the source of 81.6 percent of local tax revenue in Texas (the national average for this figure was 46.7 percent). Updated information is to be posted Dec. 9, 2016, bureau spokesman Sean Patrick told us by email. Regional differences When we looked into this topic before, advocates including Dick Lavine of the liberal-leaning Center for Public Policy Priorities and Dale Craymer of the business-backed Texas Taxpayers and Research Association suggested we consider a comparison study by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy showing that property owners in the biggest cities of Texas, especially Houston and San Antonio, had some of the highest property taxes in 2014 compared with large cities in other states. That remained so the next year, according to a June 2016 institute study indicating, for instance, that El Paso homeowners in 2015 ranked No. 3 among the country’s 50 most populous cities in homestead property taxes on a $150,000 property or $300,000 property. Among the 50 cities, homestead taxes in large Texas cities including Austin, Dallas and San Antonio ranked No. 5 (Fort Worth) to No. 13 (Houston), according to the report. The disparity between property taxes by county comes through in real-dollar terms, although measures of taxes in terms of dollars paid can be distorted by the difference in home prices from county to county. A Tax Foundation map shows in real dollars just how much property taxes vary from county to county based on IRS data reflecting the amount of real estate taxes deducted from federal taxes. In 2013, Texas counties with residents paying the most were Travis ($7,553), Kendall ($6,916) and Fort Bend ($6,813), while those paying the least are Dickens ($1,325), Stonewall ($1,425) and Hudspeth ($1,450). Another factor to think about when considering the property tax burden for the average Texan is the rate of home ownership. The Tax Foundation map showing Texas tied for sixth-highest in property taxes considered the percentage of home value that’s paid in property taxes on owner-occupied housing. In 2015, 61.1 percent of Texas housing was owner-occupied, tying the state with Oregon for the nation’s sixth-lowest rate, according to the Census Bureau. Our ruling Patrick said: "Texans pay the sixth-highest property tax in the nation." While it may be true that on average, Texas property taxes are the sixth-highest in the nation, the actual taxpayer burden on residents can vary greatly by locality, making the average less representative. We rate the claim Mostly True. MOSTLY TRUE – The statement is accurate but needs clarification or additional information. Click here for more on the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check | null | Dan Patrick | null | null | null | 2016-12-01T18:58:12 | 2016-11-29 | ['None'] |
pomt-06020 | Freshman Rep. Bob Gibbs "is spending his one year anniversary on vacation — only working 6 days in all of January." | pants on fire! | /ohio/statements/2012/jan/16/democratic-congressional-campaign-committee/dccc-says-bob-gibbs-vacationing-congress-all-six-d/ | Working hard, or hardly working? That question has been asked about Congress since at least the middle of the 20th century, when Congress adopted a three-day work week (making Monday and Friday travel days) and longer sessions. Congressional leaders keep fiddling with the calendar. Their scheduling practices, as noted by their own Congressional Research Service, have been criticized frequently for leading to "compressed workweeks, protracted daily sessions, conflicts between floor and committee work, pressure on family life, and inefficient use of time generally." The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which works to elect Democrats to the House of Representatives, raised scheduling as an issue in a news release aimed at Rep. Bob Gibbs, a Republican from the 18th District in east-central Ohio. The release marked the first anniversary of Gibbs' swearing-in. Identical releases targeted at least seven other first-term Republicans. "With so much work to do to get the economy back on track and Americans back to work," it said, "Gibbs is spending his one year anniversary on vacation — only working 6 days in all of January." PolitiFact Ohio is quite familiar with the six-day workweek. The six-day month was something new. We asked the DCCC for verification. They referred us to the official House calendar released last month by GOP Majority Leader Eric Cantor. It shows the House scheduled to be in session on six days in January: the 17th, 18th, 23rd, 24th, 25th and 31st. "Our release highlights that the primary role of a member of Congress is to serve in Congress," DCCC press secretary Haley Morris said. "When folks run for office, they run to go to Washington to enact policy and vote. Under GOP majority, the House and Congressman Gibbs are spending most of their time this month on recess." We called Gibbs' office and asked how he has been spending his recess time. Spokeswoman Catherine Gatewood made the most of the opportunity. "Bob has been spending time with constituents to listen to their concerns, meeting with business leaders to find out how we can best turn this economy around, and engaging with public officials to learn more about how the federal government helps or hinders their work locally," she said. "The House of Representatives is often referred to as 'the People's House,' and that only remains true if the people get a voice. "Bob Gibbs believes that best way to represent his constituents is to hear directly from them, and the best way to do that is to be out and active in the district." In fact, "travel days" and "home district periods" are facts of congressional life, whether the district time is used for constituent services, meetings or fundraising. Recesses are called "work breaks" rather than vacations. "To be sure, few members will head to the beach," The Christian Science Monitor noted last fall. "Between fundraisers, town-hall meetings, and constituent services, they tend to work at least as hard out of session as they do in it." Committees can meet and hold hearings during a recess. And Gibbs’ congressional offices in Washington and in his Ohio district remain staffed and open, even if the House is not in session. Cantor drew criticism for setting a light, 109-day calendar for 2012. But the scheduled 123-day calendar for 2011 became 175 days in session, according to figures the Office of the House Clerk provided. The 104-day calendar that a Democratic majority set for 2008 -- another election year -- became 119 days. House sessions have averaged 135 days since 2000. PolitiFact won't take sides on the question of whether Congress should meet more or less frequently or has it just right. But we think the DCCC's claim that House members are on vacation on days when no session is scheduled ignores the realities of what makes up a representative’s job. Subcommittee meetings and fact-finding hearings? They don’t count. Solving problems raised by constituents? Doesn’t count either. Nor does time spent meeting in the district with the people they are supposed to represent. And it’s important to remember, too, that the legislative calendar isn’t set by the individual members. The calendar for all is set by Cantor and congressional leadership. That means that the gauge the DCCC has applied here would support making the same claim about just six working days in January for every Democratic member, too, from minority leader Nancy Pelosi to Democratic National Committee chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Somehow we doubt they are making those claims. When a claim is not accurate, it earns a rating of False. But when the statement also makes a ridiculous claim, as this one does, it’s time to turn up the heat on the Truth-O-Meter: Pants on Fire. | null | Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee | null | null | null | 2012-01-16T06:00:00 | 2012-01-05 | ['None'] |
pomt-08627 | Says the Austin chapter of the League of Women Voters has no Republicans among elected officers or on its debate committee. | half-true | /texas/statements/2010/sep/20/steve-munisteri/steve-munisteri-republican-party-chair-says-austin/ | Urging two GOP candidates for the State Board of Education not to join a televised debate being organized by the Austin area's chapter of the League of Women Voters, the chairman of the Republican Party of Texas said Aug. 31 that the group's officers and debate committee members had voted in multiple Democratic primaries. "How can the Austin chapter of the LWV claim to be non-partisan when there are no Republicans among their elected officers or on their debate committee?" Chairman Steve Munisteri said. In this article, we aren't testing the GOP's contention the Austin chapter can't be considered non-partisan because of its leaders' personal voting histories. Dem are fighting words and the fight's not here. But we wondered if Munisteri accurately tweaked an absence of Republicans among the leaguers whose chapter is affiliated with the long-established national group that trumpets a non-partisan interest in encouraging voter education and participation. Notably, this isn't our first foray into checking personal voting histories to gauge individuals' partisan leans. In May, we found False a claim that out of 50 registered voters in the history department at the University of Texas, one is a Republican. By our count, of 48 history department faculty members registered to vote in Travis County, five had participated in Republican primaries, four of them voting in this year's GOP primary. Also of significance: Voting in a Republican or Democratic primary doesn't always mean a person sees himself as belonging to that party — never mind the bulk of voters who abstain from primaries and whose political affiliations, if any, aren't reflected in voting records. Unlike in some other states, Texas voters don't register their party affiliation. Any registered voter can vote in any primary (though they can't switch to the other party's runoffs). Per the Texas GOP's claim about the Austin chapter of the League of Women Voters, the party's supporting press release provides primary voting histories for 13 league activists. From 2004 through 2010, the party says, these individuals voted 45 out of 52 times in Democratic primaries; in seven instances, the selected members did not vote in a primary. And among the 13, the party says, there was no instance of anyone voting in a Republican primary. We asked the GOP for its research and learned that it checked Travis County records for the voting histories of 24 chapter activists. According to the GOP's summary of that research, the 24 activists (counting the 13 highlighted by Munisteri) voted 66 times in Democratic primaries from 2004 through 2010 and four times in Republican primaries. More than 20 times, the GOP says, the activists did not vote in any primary. Munisteri agreed in an interview with us that primary participation doesn't always prove party affiliation. That said, Munisteri said, "if somebody has never voted in the Republican primary and in the last four Democratic primaries they have voted in all four Democratic primaries, they are a Democrat." With help from Frances McIntyre, the chapter's president, we realized that Munisteri's statement--that no elected board members or debate committee members are Republicans--centers on 11 individuals, six identified as "elected officers" on the chapter's website and five McIntyre confirmed to us as its debate committee members; she said a sixth committee member was overlooked. Among the 11, the GOP summary says, six voted in all four Democratic primaries since 2004, four voted in three out of four Democratic primaries, one voted in two of the party's primaries--and none voted in a Republican primary. We asked Munisteri if it's possible that some Republican-leaning voters participate in Travis County's Democratic primaries to have sway over who fills local elected posts, which are most often won by Democrats. Munisteri replied: "I don’t believe that any committed Republican votes four out of the last four times in the Democratic primary." He added that none of the league activists singled out in the GOP's sally "has denied they are Democrats." Powerful case? So it seems, especially after Abbie Tobias, a Travis County superviser of voter registration, confirmed the voting histories of 17 of 24 individuals in the GOP's review, except that two of the 17 (including a debate committee member) voted in the 2008 Democratic primary (the GOP had said both did not vote in that year's primaries). One person the party says voted in the 2010 Republican primary has no record of voting in the past four primaries, Tobias determined. She wasn't able to gauge the voting histories for the other voters because their names were too common in the database or were missing altogether. For her part, McIntyre told us she's always been a Democrat. However, she said, "a lot of my friends have voted in various primaries, or in the general election they vote with the Libertarians." Regardless of personal primary histories, she said, the league is resolutely non-partisan; she passed along the chapter's nonpartisan "policy statement," which says board members "shall refrain from conspicuous partisan political activities." She said the chapter has 285 members. After we informed McIntyre that the GOP's original research covered 13 additional league activists, she noted that six of those 13 are elected board members--equivalent in status to elected officers except they serve one-year rather than two-year terms. A wrinkle: The GOP's research says two of the six board members voted in this year's GOP primary and one of the pair, Lenora DuBose, also voted in the 2004 Republican primary. We called DuBose, who oversees the league's voter guide. She confirmed her voting history and said she considers herself a Republican. Separately, our search of campaign finance filings at the Texas Ethics Commission indicated that DuBose has made donations to the campaigns of Victor Carrillo, a Republican on the Texas Railroad Commission. (The other board member the GOP found to have voted in the 2010 Republican primary declined to comment.) Next, we asked the Republican Party why Munisteri disregarded DuBose's vote history. Spokesman Chris Elam noted via e-mail that the chapter's website separates out its "elected officers" whose voting histories support Munisteri's statement. Other board members are listed as "directors." McIntyre conceded in an e-mail that a visitor to the site could be confused about which individuals were elected to the board, but she said who gets elected to what is clear in a "workbook" sent to members before the chapter's board elections. All in all, Elam said, the Austin chapter has no Republicans among its elected officers while among their directors, they have one. How does Munisteri's statement come out? His claim--"there are no Republicans among their elected officers or on their debate committee"--is staked to the not-always-so premise that primary voting patterns prove one's partisan lean. Still, the verifiable vote histories of the 11 people cherry-picked in the statement seem to demonstrate common Democratic inclinations. That said, it appears that two elected board members voted in this year's Republican primary including DuBose, who told us she considers herself a Republican. Her voting history alone--which the party had in hand before Munisteri made his statement--weakens the claim that no Republicans guide the chapter. We rate Munisteri's statement Half True. | null | Steve Munisteri | null | null | null | 2010-09-20T06:00:00 | 2010-08-31 | ['Republican_Party_(United_States)', 'League_of_Women_Voters', 'Austin,_Texas'] |
snes-02373 | A video shows National Guard members turning their backs in response to a flag-stomping protest in 2015. | unproven | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/flag-protest-baltimore/ | null | Viral Phenomena | null | Dan MacGuill | null | National Guard Troops ‘Turn Their Backs’ on a Protest in Baltimore? | 23 May 2017 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-14253 | Poll after poll after poll shows me beating Hillary. | mostly false | /truth-o-meter/statements/2016/apr/11/ted-cruz/national-surveys-show-ted-cruz-isnt-beating-hillar/ | A key selling point for Republican presidential candidates is that they're the one who can beat Democrat Hillary Clinton in November. With the New York primary coming up on Tuesday, April 19, that was part of the pitch Ted Cruz made when interviewed on CNN by Dana Bash. The Texas senator said five of the 17 original Republican candidates now support him, along with other prominent Republicans, "and what we are seeing, that's the unity it's going take to win the nomination. It's also the unity it's going to take to beat Hillary Clinton. And my focus is on beating Hillary Clinton, and poll after poll after poll shows Donald losing badly to Hillary. And poll after poll after poll shows me beating Hillary." That's a lot of polls. We just looked at how Trump does against Clinton after conservative commentator Glenn Beck said on the April 10 edition of Meet the Press that polls show "Hillary Clinton wins every time with Donald Trump." We rated that statement True. For this check, we wondered if Cruz was accurately portraying his standing in the national surveys. We went back to RealClearPolitics.com and found that the Texas senator is off. Of the nine surveys released in the last month, Cruz beats Clinton in only one — a Fox News poll where Cruz scores 3 percentage points higher than Clinton. The two were tied in the latest McClatchy/Marist poll and in a CNN/ORC poll. The margins of error were +/- 3 percentage points. In the other six polls, Clinton beat Cruz. In four of those surveys, Clinton's margin exceeded the margin of error. Cruz was looking stronger against Clinton in February, where he tied or beat Clinton in five of six surveys. But in only one of those polls was Cruz's margin greater than the margin of error. If you use the most recent results from the various polling organizations since Feb. 4, Cruz wins in two, ties in two and loses in seven. We contacted Cruz's spokeswoman to ask about the results but didn't hear back. So when Cruz says he beats Clinton in poll after poll after poll, he's short a poll or two. We rate his claim Mostly False.https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/f0083e82-0e00-42ed-9446-ae107d0b4c17 | null | Ted Cruz | null | null | null | 2016-04-11T16:30:36 | 2016-04-07 | ['None'] |
pomt-10202 | When George Bush said we shouldn't investigate why the government's response to Hurricane Katrina was so incompetent, John McCain stood with him. | half-true | /truth-o-meter/statements/2008/sep/15/joe-biden/mccain-supported-republican-backed-investigation/ | In a speech hammering the theme that Sen. John McCain would not offer much change from the last eight years under President George W. Bush, Sen. Joe Biden hit on what many consider a low point of the Bush presidency: the federal government's slow response to Hurricane Katrina. "When George Bush said we shouldn't investigate why the government's response to Hurricane Katrina was so incompetent, John McCain stood with him," Biden said in a speech in St. Clair Shores, Mich., on Sept. 15, 2008. It's true that McCain joined other Republicans in the Senate to fend off Democratic efforts led by Sen. Hillary Clinton to create an independent commission to examine the federal, state and local response to Hurricane Katrina. On Sept. 14, 2005, McCain and 53 other Senate Republicans rejected an effort by Clinton to establish the commission by attaching an amendment to a spending bill. Republicans said the move violated Senate rules by attempting to legislate policy via a spending bill. Less than five months later, on Feb. 2, 2006, McCain joined with 52 Senate Republicans in a vote to kill a Clinton effort to attach a similar amendment to a tax bill. Both votes came down entirely along partisan lines. And they came at a time of particularly bitter recriminations over the federal response to Hurricane Katrina, while the White House was refusing to release certain documents or to make senior officials available for sworn testimony before Congress, citing the confidentiality of executive branch communications. But it's misleading to suggest that McCain opposed all efforts to investigate the government's response to Katrina. Republicans in the GOP-controlled Senate threw their support behind a probe by the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, which looked into the federal role in hurricane preparedness and its response. Republican leaders expressed faith in the bipartisan investigation and derided Democratic efforts to charter an independent commission to conduct a parallel inquiry. An aide to then-Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., called amendments to establish an independent Katrina commission "taxpayer-funded flatulence that would just waste time and money to distract from the inquiry already well under way in the Senate." And Republicans did offer to create a bipartisan congressional committee consisting of senators and representatives to examine the hurricane response. But Democrats took a pass, saying it wouldn't be truly bipartisan because as minority party they wouldn't have subpoena power. Biden is correct that McCain did not support the Democratic plan to create an independent commission to investigate the government's response to Katrina. But McCain didn't oppose all investigation. He supported the Homeland Security investigation. It may not have been the kind of investigation the Democrats wanted. It may not have had the independence Democrats wanted. But it was an investigation. And so we rate Biden's statement Half True. | null | Joe Biden | null | null | null | 2008-09-15T00:00:00 | 2008-09-15 | ['John_McCain', 'George_W._Bush', 'Hurricane_Katrina'] |
vogo-00028 | Statement: “San Diego today is the largest city in the United States that has run out of raw land. Except in the largely industrial Otay Mesa area, it is simply not possible for San Diego to continue growing in this traditional way,” former San Diego planning director Bill Fulton wrote in a Jan. 3 U-T San Diego op-ed. | determination: true | https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/topics/news/fact-check-san-diegos-dearth-of-raw-land/ | Analysis: San Diego’s in the midst of a major push-pull over the future of development. | null | null | null | null | Fact Check: San Diego's Dearth of Raw Land | January 9, 2015 | null | ['United_States', 'San_Diego', 'U-T_San_Diego'] |
goop-00852 | Meghan Markle Buying Home In Malibu? | 0 | https://www.gossipcop.com/meghan-markle-malibu-home/ | null | null | null | Shari Weiss | null | Meghan Markle Buying Home In Malibu? | 3:00 am, June 9, 2018 | null | ['None'] |
goop-00278 | Angelina Jolie Begging Kids To Choose Her Over Brad Pitt, | 0 | https://www.gossipcop.com/angelina-jolie-brad-pitt-custody-kids-choose/ | null | null | null | Andrew Shuster | null | Angelina Jolie NOT Begging Kids To Choose Her Over Brad Pitt, Despite Claim | 5:47 pm, September 12, 2018 | null | ['Brad_Pitt'] |
snes-05129 | Temptations cat treats are causing renal failure in cats. | unproven | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/temptations-cat-treats-facebook-warning/ | null | Critter Country | null | Kim LaCapria | null | Temptations Cat Treats Facebook Warning | 2 March 2016 | null | ['None'] |
snes-00347 | Did Republicans Vote to Make It Legal to Ban Gays and Lesbians from Adopting? | true | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/republicans-ban-gays-lesbians-adopting/ | null | Politics | null | David Emery | null | Did Republicans Vote to Make It Legal to Ban Gays and Lesbians from Adopting? | 14 July 2018 | null | ['None'] |
farg-00336 | David Hogg Changes Story, Wasn’t At School When Cruz Opened Fire. | false | https://www.factcheck.org/2018/04/david-hogg-at-school-during-parkland-shooting/ | null | askfactcheck | FactCheck.org | Angelo Fichera | ['gun control'] | David Hogg at School During Parkland Shooting | April 3, 2018 | 2018-04-03 22:13:10 UTC | ['None'] |
pomt-02578 | Women "make 77 cents for every dollar a man earns." | mostly true | /truth-o-meter/statements/2014/jan/29/barack-obama/barack-obama-state-union-says-women-make-77-cents-/ | During his State of the Union address, President Barack Obama made a claim about pay for women in today’s economy. "You know, today, women make up about half our workforce, but they still make 77 cents for every dollar a man earns," Obama said. "That is wrong, and in 2014, it's an embarrassment. Women deserve equal pay for equal work." It was not the first time Obama (or other Democrats) have offered the 77-cent data point -- not by a long shot. A search on the White House website calls up literally dozens of examples of policy papers, blog posts and speeches in which the president cited the 77-cent statistic. He used it in a proclamation for National Equal Pay Day (July 20, 2010), in remarks at a White House forum on women and the economy (April 6, 2012), in a conference call with reporters (June 4, 2012), and remarks on the 50th anniversary of the Equal Pay Act (June 10, 2013), just to cite a few. Before we get into the statistics, we need to explain how we’re approaching this claim in this fact-check. We’ve heard the 77-cent statistic used a lot of different ways, and small changes in wording make a big difference in determining whether it’s accurate or not. The less accurate version -- once offered by Obama himself -- states that women make 77 cents for every dollar a man earns for the same work, or in the same job. As we’ll explain below, the data doesn’t show that. By contrast, the more accurate version simply states that women make 77 cents for every dollar a man earns, period. That is more accurate (though not without some caveats, also listed below). We struggled a bit with how to classify the claim Obama made in the State of the Union, since his phrasing was somewhat ambiguous. He used the more accurate formulation, but he then followed up two sentences later by saying, "Women deserve equal pay for equal work." Did Obama’s "equal pay for equal work" line suggest that he believes the 77-cent pay differential refers to statistical comparisons of "equal work"? Or was this sentence simply a philosophical statement that was distinct from the statistical claim? Ultimately, we decided that Obama’s statement that "women deserve equal pay for equal work" was aspirational rather than a part of his statistical claim, so we’re judging him on his claim that women "make 77 cents for every dollar a man earns." Here’s a rundown of what we’ve found in the past, updated for the most recent data. Ratios vary depending on the methodology The basic federal data comes from two agencies -- the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. But the two agencies’ numbers don’t exactly agree. The Census Bureau, which tracks annual wages, found women who worked full-time, year-round in 2012 made 77 cents for every dollar men earned across the country -- a percentage in line with what it’s been for the last few years. This comparison includes all male and female workers regardless of occupation. Meanwhile, the Bureau of Labor Statistics uses a different measures to analyze the pay gap, including weekly wages. BLS found that women who worked full time in wage and salary jobs had median usual weekly earnings of $669 in 2012, which was 82 percent of men’s median weekly earnings. This, too, was in line with the ratio in recent years. What’s the difference? Unlike the measure of annual wages by the Census Bureau, the weekly wage analysis does not account for people who are self-employed. It does include people left out of the year-round wage measure, such as some teachers, construction workers and seasonal workers. Another measure -- hourly rates -- shows a smaller degree of pay disparity. According to BLS data, women were paid 86 percent of the median hourly wages of men in 2012. This evaluation accounts for part-time (fewer than 35 hours) workers, which are more often women and are paid less than their salaried counterparts. Women paid by the hour made median hourly earnings of $11.99, compared to $13.88 for men. However, this figure excludes salaried workers -- another reason why the statistics differ. Heidi Hartmann, president of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, told PolitiFact in 2012 that the measure of annual wages is preferable, since it doesn’t exclude salaried workers. "It’s the one that goes back the furthest in time," she said. "It’s the one that is most traditional." But some researchers, such as the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, prefer working with hourly wages, arguing "an incomplete picture" is cast with weekly earnings because women work fewer hours than men, "which would make a gap in weekly earnings between the two groups substantial even if their hourly wages are the same." In other words, there’s a range of professional opinion on what the data shows. Differences in jobs held It’s important to point out a few additional caveats. First, there’s a significant variation in wage gaps from occupation to occupation. The Institute for Women’s Policy research looked at pay parity for the top 20 occupations for women in 2011 using median weekly earnings. The center found the pay gap varied depending on the sector, though women lag in nearly every category. Nurses (96 cents for every dollar) and cashiers (90 cents) were closer than most; accountants (77 cents) and financial advisers (66 cents) were more divergent than most. Second, it’s important to note that the existence of a pay gap doesn’t necessarily mean that the gap is caused by individual employer-level discrimination. Rather, some portion is likely the result of broader demographic patterns. For instance, men and women historically enter certain fields more than others -- a phenomenon known as "occupational segregation." Women more often choose to be receptionists, nurses and teachers, while men pursue paths as truck drivers, managers and computer software engineers, according to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. When data from all these fields is combined together, as in the Census and BLS studies, the gap is at least partially explained by the predominance of women in lower-paying fields, rather than women necessarily being paid less for the same job than men are. In addition, women disproportionately obtain degrees that lead to lower-paying jobs than men, and they take more time off from work for pregnancy and child care, according to a 2009 analysis by the nonpartisan CONSAD Research Corp. in Pittsburgh. Despite the growth in fathers’ role in child care, the child-care burden shouldered by women tends to restrict their career options and hours worked. While such patterns raise important policy questions, they don’t necessarily point to discrimination per se. So how much of a role does discrimination play? Hartmann attributed anywhere from one-quarter to one-third of the gap to direct discrimination by the employer. A U.S. Labor Department blog post put it a bit higher -- around 40 percent. The CONSAD paper suggested that when you control for every factor but discrimination, the gap shrunk to between 93 cents and 95 cents -- not zero, but significantly smaller than the 77-cent figure Obama used. When we checked with the White House, a spokesman acknowledged that there is more than one way to calculate the gender pay gap, and that discrimination isn’t the only factor causing the gap. But the spokesman added that it would be wrong to ignore how discrimination and differences in workplace flexibility impact occupational choice. Our ruling Obama said women "make 77 cents for every dollar a man earns." It's worth noting that the entire 77-cent gap is not necessarily due to discrimination -- a conclusion some listeners might have drawn when hearing Obama mention "equal pay for equal work" shortly after citing the 77-cent figure. And there are alternative calculations that show a smaller overall gap. Still, the 77-cent ratio is a credible figure from a credible agency. We rate the claim Mostly True. | null | Barack Obama | null | null | null | 2014-01-29T18:14:04 | 2014-01-28 | ['None'] |
pomt-11107 | Flip Flop! After opposing term limits for decades, Adam Putnam adopts Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis’ position. | half-true | /florida/statements/2018/jun/08/florida-democratic-party/did-adam-putnam-adopt-donald-trump-and-ron-desanti/ | Republican governor candidate Adam Putnam has been a politician for over half of his life, providing opponents a long history of stances to chew on. "Flip Flop! After opposing term limits for decades, Adam Putnam adopts Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis’ position," read the subject line of a Florida Democratic Party news release. Putnam’s flip-flop, according to the Florida Democrats, came June 6 when he weighed in on term limits for school board members. "If term limits are good enough for the governor and the Legislature, they're good enough for school boards," Putnam said via email to the Tampa Bay Times. Term limits have been an issue in Florida for quite some time. Voters in November will decide whether to approve a constitutional amendment establishing eight-year term limits on school board members, among other things. The proposal closely mirrors the 1992 measure that established eight-year caps on members of Florida’s Legislature. Congressional term limits are also a priority of the man Putnam is looking to replace, Gov. Rick Scott. For this reason, we wanted to see if the claim had any credence. Did Putnam really change a longtime stance opposing term limits to one that lines up with DeSantis and Trump? While there is some truth to this claim, the link to Trump is largely irrelevant. Trump’s position on term limits is mainly about Congress, not school boards and state legislatures. Putnam on term limits over the years Putnam served in the U.S. House for 10 years before he started the first of two terms as agriculture commissioner in 2011. He also was a member of the Florida House from 1996 to 2000. The issue of term limits has come up several times over his political tenure. The Democrats latched onto several instances of Putnam discussing why, at the federal level, he did not support a limit on terms. When Putnam was first elected to the U.S. House in 2000, he hinted that voters should control the term lengths of lawmakers. "I have always believed that voters are the ultimate term limit implementers," Putnam said Nov. 25, 2000, according to the Associated Press. "The voters are pretty effective at giving those two-year job evaluations." He turned down signing a term-limit pledge in Congress as a candidate in 2000. And he voted against term limits as a citizen, he said, when they were on the referendum in the state of Florida in 1992. (He was 18 at the time.) "I believe term limits are implemented every two years by the voting public for the House of Representatives," Putnam said in a 2001 appearance on CNN. "I voted against them when they were on the referendum in the state of Florida. And so, therefore, I did not take the pledge." And finally, as agriculture commissioner in 2012, Putnam suggested that the eight-year term limit on state lawmakers impedes their ability to do their job. "The eight-year (term limit) time frame virtually guarantees the likelihood of someone spending more than one term as a committee chair is almost nil because it suggests you are ineffective," Putnam said in a Tampa Bay Times column. Did he flip to a position of DeSantis, Trump? The Democrats started to shout "flip-flop" after a comment by Putnam on June 4, 2018. Putnam said he supports term limits on school board members, telling the Tampa Bay Times that "if term limits are good enough for the governor and the legislature, they're good enough for school boards." That position is consistent with his primary opponent, DeSantis, who recently penned an op-ed for the U.S. Term Limits website in support of Florida’s Amendment 8 requiring school board term limits. "No elected office, whether federal or local, is ever better off when run by career politicians," DeSantis wrote. "That’s why I support eight-year term limits for all school board member." The connection to Trump is more tenuous. As a presidential candidate, Trump promised to enact a constitutional amendment that would extend term limits to all members of Congress (which is Stalled on our Trump-O-Meter). "If I’m elected president, I will push for a constitutional amendment to impose term limits on all members of Congress," Trump said at a rally in Colorado Springs, Colo. "Right? They’ve been talking about that for years." Trump’s 100-day action plan also detailed his term-limit plans for Congress. But Trump has not specifically come out in support of school board term limits, in Florida or elsewhere, as Putnam did. To back up the Trump connection, Florida Democratic Party spokesman Kevin Donohoe pointed to an alleged remark from a 2016 rally in South Carolina to suggest Trump’s comments throughout the 2016 campaign were broad enough to make the argument he supports term limits for "any politician." "Under my proposal, there will never be a 'next campaign' for any politician in America ever again," a Newsmax article quoted Trump as saying. We checked the Lexis Nexis and CQ databases for evidence of Trump’s remark, as well as Factba.se, which compiles everything the president has ever publicly said or tweeted. As it turns out, Trump didn’t really say that. The quote came from a 2016 column on The Blaze by Wayne Allyn Root, who urged Trump to brand himself the "Term Limits President." "Here is the speech Donald should give this week in South Carolina," Root wrote, before adding the quote that was shared on Newsmax. Our ruling The Florida Democratic Party said, "Flip-flop: After opposing term limits for decades, Adam Putnam adopts Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis’ position." The Democrats are conflating Putnam’s general position against term limits for members of Congress and state government with a recent ballot initiative on school boards. They have a point that Putnam has long been skeptical of term limits, declining pledges to support them, criticizing them as impeding sound governance, and voting against them in 1992 as a young adult. Putnam’s most recent comments in support of term limits for school board members do suggest a change in tone, and they are in line with his opponent, DeSantis. However, Trump’s position on term limits is a red herring in this case. Trump has promised to enact congressional term limits, but has not specifically come out in support of term limits for school board members. A piece of evidence the Democrats provided relies on a suggested speech for Trump, and is not a stated philosophy. For a claim that is partially accurate but omits critical context, we rate it Half True. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com | null | Florida Democratic Party | null | null | null | 2018-06-08T09:00:00 | 2018-06-06 | ['Adam_Putnam'] |
pomt-02491 | Seventy percent of all uninsured live in households in which at least one person is working. | true | /virginia/statements/2014/feb/17/terry-mcauliffe/mcauliffe-says-70-percent-medically-uninsured-live/ | Gov. Terry McAuliffe is urging the General Assembly to expand Virginia’s Medicaid program, in part, because it would help the working poor. "Seventy percent of all uninsured live in households in which at least one person is working," he said last month in an address to the legislature. When we asked where the figure came from, McAuliffe spokesman Brian Coy sent us a presentation used by the Virginia Health Care Foundation, a non-profit organization seeking to increase access to health care for the uninsured. The percentage was computed in 2011 by the Urban Institute, a research organization. There’s a slight caveat McAuliffe did not explain. The 70 percent figure applies to people up to the age 64, as most people older than that are part of Medicare and, therefore, insured. The analysis divided workers into two categories: Those working more than 35 hours per week were deemed full-time; while those working 35 hours or less per week were deemed part-time. Of the uninsured living in Virginia: 40.7 percent lived in a family with one full-time worker 23.7 percent lived in a family with only part-time workers 5.9 percent lived in a family with two full-time workers 28.6 percent live in a family with no workers 1.1 percent are children not living with adults. That adds up to 70.3 percent of uninsured Virginians living in a household where at least one person is working. For perspective, roughly 1 million Virginians are uninsured -- about 12 percent of the population. Our ruling McAuliffe said 70 percent of medically uninsured Virginians live in households where at least one person works. His figure is backed by research from the Urban Institute and we were unable to find any contradictory study. So we rate McAuliffe’s claim True. | null | Terry McAuliffe | null | null | null | 2014-02-17T00:00:00 | 2014-01-13 | ['None'] |
snes-04693 | President Obama apologized for dropping bombs on Japan at the end of World War II. | false | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/obama-apology-hiroshima/ | null | Politicians | null | Dan Evon | null | Obama Apologizes for Dropping Atomic Bomb on Japan? | 29 May 2016 | null | ['Japan', 'Barack_Obama'] |
snes-03055 | People are being victimized by scammers who call and ask "Can you hear me?" and record the "yes" response in order to use it to authorize fake charges. | unproven | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/can-you-hear-me-scam/ | null | Fraud & Scams | null | Kim LaCapria | null | ‘Can You Hear Me?’ Scam Warning | 27 January 2017 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-14917 | Electric car sales in Georgia have dropped dramatically since a $5,000 tax credit was eliminated and a $200 annual registration fee was imposed July 1. | true | /georgia/statements/2015/nov/02/don-francis/electric-car-sales-hit-brakes-tax-credit-axed-and-/ | The Georgia General Assembly earlier this year pulled the plug on one of the nation’s most generous state tax credits for electric cars. At the same time, state lawmakers voted to impose a $200 annual registration fee on owners of some plug-in hybrids and all zero-emissions vehicles to make up for the gas taxes those motorists don’t pay and to help fund a backlog of road projects. Both changes took effect July 1, and already, preliminary numbers show sales of the Nissan Leaf and other electric cars are plummeting, Don Francis, coordinator of the Clean Cities-Georgia Coalition, said in an interview published Oct. 28 at Watchdog.org. New electric car registrations in Georgia fell 89 percent from 1,338 in June, the last month that the tax credit was available, to 148 in August, Francis said. Sound surprising? Maybe not. True? PolitiFact decided to dig deeper. First, we’ll provide some background. Georgia started providing a tax credit for electric car purchases in 1998. Initially, businesses and individuals were offered a tax credit up to $1,500 as incentive to buy alternative-fuel vehicles. Two years later, the credit was upped to $2,500 for all low-emission vehicles, and in 2001, it was doubled to $5,000 for zero-emission vehicles. By comparison, Louisiana and Maryland offer a credit up to $3,000, and Utah gives up to $1,500. All three states limit the tax credit to vehicle purchases. Georgia’s $5,000 credit meant huge savings for state residents who wanted to buy or even lease an electric car -- especially when coupled with a federal tax credit that could be as much as $7,500, depending on the capacity of the vehicle’s battery. Those who wanted to get rid of the tax credit said that the double tax credits were excessive and allowing Atlanta yuppies to lease electric cars, including the $30,000 Leaf, for as little as $100 a month. Supporters said the tax credit made Georgia one of the top states for electric cars, a positive step especially in metro Atlanta where air pollution from auto emissions has been a persistent problem. Statewide, electric car ownership has jumped dramatically just in the past couple of years.. According to the state Revenue Department, 1,743 electric cars were riding the roads of Georgia in 2012. By 2014, that number had soared to 15,729, or an increase of 802 percent, with two-thirds of them parking outside homes in metro Atlanta’s four biggest counties -- Fulton (4,288), Cobb (2,397), Gwinnett (2,087) and DeKalb (2,067). Proposals to eliminate the tax credit went nowhere in 2013 and 2014. But in this year’s legislative session, when raising $1 billion for transportation projects was a priority, budget analysts said cutting the tax credit for electric cars would bring in $66 million by 2016 and nearly $190 million by 2020. Supporters of the tax credit touted a private study that said, without the tax credit, Georgia’s economy would lose $252 million in the next 16 years. What the numbers say We began our fact check by contacting Francis, who opposed abolishing the state tax credit during this year’s General Assembly session. Francis shared with PolitiFact a spreadsheet that he developed based on motor vehicle data he obtained from a national automotive information company. The data showed a spike in Georgia’s electric car sales in the months between when lawmakers voted to kill the tax credit and when it officially expired July 1. Sales declined sharply in July, going from 1,338 in June to 776, and fell even more, to 149, in August, the last month for which data are available, Francis said. "When you were selling an average of just over 1,000 (cars) a month and then it goes to 150 a month, you have to say: ‘What changed?’" Francis said. "Two things changed: The tax credit went away, and the $200 fee was added." We contacted officials at IHS Automotive, the company where Francis received the data used in the spreadsheet, and asked it to review the accuracy of his information. Michelle Culver, senior manager for corporate communications at IHS, said via an email that "we did a spot check on this, and it is our data and accurate." We also decided to find out what the Georgia Department of Revenue, the agency in charge of vehicle registrations in the state, was seeing. William Gaston, the department’s spokesman, sent us data on new car sales, rather than new car registrations. The reason, he said, was an owner could register a vehicle after July 1 but have purchased it before the deadline and thus qualify for the tax credit. Revenue Department numbers and Francis’ data brought us to the same conclusion -- sales of electric cars have done a nosedive. Specifically, Georgians purchased 5,434 zero-emissions vehicles -- or an average of 905 a month -- from Jan. 1 to June 30 of this year, when the $5,000 tax credit was available. Between July 1 and Sept. 30 -- when the state tax credit was no longer available -- 439 electric cars were sold, or about 149 per month. Our ruling: Don Francis, coordinator of the Clean Cities-Georgia Coalition, said electric car sales in Georgia have dropped dramatically since a $5,000 tax credit was eliminated and a $200 annual registration fee was imposed July 1. That statement is backed up by data available so far on new car registrations and new car sales. Keep in mind that car sales spiked as people rushed to buy before the credit expired July 1, and that makes the post-July 1 drop in sales look that much more shocking. Whether that trend holds remains to be seen. But everything we found so far indicates Francis is on the money. We therefore rate his statement as True. | null | Don Francis | null | null | null | 2015-11-02T00:00:00 | 2015-10-28 | ['None'] |
chct-00168 | FACT CHECK: Did Lawmakers Have Less Than A Minute Per Page To Read The Omnibus Before Voting? | verdict: true | http://checkyourfact.com/2018/03/24/fact-check-less-than-minute-per-page-omnibus/ | null | null | null | Emily Larsen | Fact Check Reporter | null | null | 12:56 PM 03/24/2018 | null | ['None'] |
snes-02103 | Is China's 'Panda Bear Solar Farm' Real? | miscaptioned | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/panda-solar-farm-china/ | null | Fauxtography | null | Dan Evon | null | Is China’s ‘Panda Bear Solar Farm’ Real? | 6 July 2017 | null | ['China'] |
chct-00100 | FACT CHECK: Was American Independence Actually Declared On July 2? | verdict: true | http://checkyourfact.com/2018/07/04/fact-check-independence-declared-july-2/ | null | null | null | Emily Larsen | Fact Check Reporter | null | null | 10:11 AM 07/04/2018 | null | ['None'] |
snes-03354 | Folding a $5 bill in a specific pattern will reveal a secret image of a stack of pancakes. | false | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/secret-pancakes-on-5-bill/ | null | Fauxtography | null | Dan Evon | null | Secret Pancakes On $5 Bill | 13 December 2016 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-14708 | A Trump television ad shows Mexicans swarming over "our southern border." | pants on fire! | /truth-o-meter/statements/2016/jan/04/donald-trump/donald-trumps-first-tv-ad-shows-migrants-southern-/ | In a new television ad -- his campaign’s first -- Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump shows footage of dozens of people swarming over a border fence. But the footage isn’t as it seems. About halfway through the ad, a narrator says of Trump, "He'll stop illegal immigration by building a wall on our southern border that Mexico will pay for." Video footage shows dozens of people streaming across the border, as if they were ants fleeing an anthill. The clear suggestion is that the footage is of the "southern border" between the United States and Mexico. But it’s not -- it’s 5,000 miles away, in a small Spanish enclave on the mainland of Morocco. PolitiFact was able to trace the footage back to the Italian television network RepubblicaTV. On May 3, 2014, the network posted footage of migrants crossing the border into Melilla, one of two enclaves on the Moroccan coast that are held by Spain. Migrants who cross the border there are essentially entering territory held by a European Union nation, even though they are still on the African continent. (It can also be seen posted by a YouTube user here.) The RepubblicaTV video is time-stamped May 1, 2014. According to the description posted by the network (and using Google Translate) the video was released by the Interior Ministry in Madrid, showing an "onslaught of hundreds of migrants to the wall that separates the Spanish enclave of Melilla from Morocco. About 800 tried to cross the border on May 1st. Those who failed to escape the control of the Civil Guard were hanging on the barriers for six hours before being rejected." The 2014 RepubblicaTV video resurfaced a year later, in a July 2015 YouTube post titled, "1,000s of immigrants try to cross the border at once." It makes no reference to the location. By the time the footage made it into Trump’s ad, both RepubblicaTV’s logo and the 2014 time stamp were no longer visible. Regardless of Trump’s imagery, the Pew Research Center noted last month that "for the first time since the 1940s, more immigrants from Mexico are leaving the U.S. than coming into the country. The shift is due to several reasons, including slow economic recovery after the Great Recession that may have made the U.S. less attractive, as well as stricter enforcement of U.S. immigration laws, particularly at the border." Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks said she did not know the source of the video included in the ad and that she doesn't speak for the video production company. Our ruling Trump’s television ad purports to show Mexicans swarming over "our southern border." However, the footage used to support this point actually shows African migrants streaming over a border fence between Morocco and the Spanish enclave of Melilla, more than 5,000 miles away. We rate the claim Pants on Fire. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com | null | Donald Trump | null | null | null | 2016-01-04T14:04:38 | 2016-01-04 | ['Mexico'] |
vees-00233 | VERA FILES FACT CHECK: Duterte's evolving stance on 'endo' | none | http://verafiles.org/articles/vera-files-fact-check-dutertes-evolving-stance-endo | null | null | null | null | Duterte,campaign promise,endo | VERA FILES FACT CHECK: Duterte's evolving stance on 'endo' | April 30, 2018 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-12835 | Says President Donald Trump’s "executive order leads to capture of ISIS leader, Rasheed Muhammad." | pants on fire! | /punditfact/statements/2017/feb/07/blog-posting/trumps-executive-order-did-not-lead-isis-leaders-a/ | A fabricated news story claiming Donald Trump’s controversial executive order on immigration led to the arrest of a suspected terrorist doesn’t pass inspection. "Executive order leads to capture of ISIS leader, Rasheed Muhammad," reads the headline on a Jan. 31, 2017, story at USAPoliticsZone.com. The post was flagged by Facebook as part of the website’s efforts to identify potentially contrived news stories. The story is false, however, and appears to have originated on a website chock full of fabricated content. Trump’s Jan. 27 order barred citizens of Iraq, Syria, Iran, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan and Libya from entering the United States for 90 days. It also puts Syrian refugee admissions on hold indefinitely. The order drew protests at airports nationwide. Trump fired acting Attorney General Sally Yates on Jan. 30 for refusing to enforce the order. The action is currently on a nationwide temporary restraining order pending judicial review. You can review some key issues about the order in this explainer. The next day, the website Times.com.mx posted the story that a suspected terrorist named Rasheen Muhammad had been arrested at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York. It included a photo of a handcuffed man flanked by men in FBI windbreakers. The story said stricter screening procedures in place because of the order were to credit, and said Yates apologized via Snapchat for being wrong. The story also quoted FBI Director James Comey as saying details would not be released as the agency investigates. None of these things happened. There was no arrest of any person named Rasheen Muhammad at JFK, terrorist or otherwise. The only Rasheen Muhammad we could find in a news search during the proper time frame was a 19-year-old gang member in Chicago being held in Cook County Jail on Feb. 4 for a juvenile warrant. Yates, who had said she was not sure Trump’s order was legal, also did not apologize for refusing to enforce it. There are no reports of such an apology, whether on Snapchat or otherwise. Comey also did not address the arrest, seeing as how the arrest never happened. Times.com.mx is another website that attempts to imitate legitimate news outlets with fake stories to lure readers. USAPoliticsZone.com and several other sites copied the story verbatim. None of the photographs are of someone named Rasheen Muhammad. Anyone with eyes can see that the three photos are actually of different people: One photo, which also ran on Times.com.mx, is of Najibullah Zazi, an Afghanistan-born Denver man arrested in September 2009 for ties to an al-Qaida plot to commit suicide bombings on the New York subway. USAPoliticsZone.com also added this image, which is of Sajmir Alimehmeti. The Bronx, N.Y., man was arrested in May 2016 on charges of providing material support to a terrorist organization for failed attempts to join or aid ISIS. Finally, USAPoliticsZone.com included this image, a still from a video of Abu Mohammad al-Adnani, who really was an ISIS leader. Al-Adnani, considered the official spokesman for the Islamic State, was reportedly killed while fighting in Syria last fall. This post has been passed off as a true news report, but it can’t clear a background check. We rate it Pants On Fire! https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/c9633303-5511-4f4e-8acf-2178c587e6dc | null | Bloggers | null | null | null | 2017-02-07T16:52:32 | 2017-01-31 | ['None'] |
hoer-00420 | Facebook Instant Personalization | facebook scams | https://www.hoax-slayer.com/facebook-instant-personalization-warning.shtml | null | null | null | Brett M. Christensen | null | Overblown and Outdated Warning - Facebook Instant Personalization | 5th August 2011 | null | ['Timeline_of_Facebook'] |
pomt-05210 | Says combined inflation and unemployment rates in October 2011 were the highest since Ronald Reagan succeeded Jimmy Carter. | false | /texas/statements/2012/jun/08/wes-riddle/wes-riddle-says-misery-index-higher-october-2011-a/ | Wes Riddle, who seeks to represent a new congressional district twisting from western Hays and Travis counties north to a sliver of Tarrant County, fired up a crowd last year by suggesting President Barack Obama was making history in a crummy way. Riddle, a retired Army lieutenant colonel now poised for a July 31, 2012, runoff with former Texas Secretary of State Roger Williams for the Republican nomination in the district, spoke at the Oct. 22, 2011, Austin Lone Star LiberTEA Fest rally, according to a DVD distributed by his campaign. "Ronald Reagan said that status quo is Latin, Latin for the mess we're in," he said. "And folks, we are in a heck of a status quo, let me tell you. How is that hope and change going for you? Are you better off than you were three years ago?" A moment later, Riddle added: "The misery index is the highest that it's been since Ronald Reagan took over from Jimmy Carter." Memorably, Reagan cited the "misery index" -- meaning the nation’s combined inflation and unemployment rates -- as an indicator that Carter merited replacement; voters agreed. We looked into whether Riddle was right that as of October 2011, the misery index was higher than at any time since Reagan became president. Online, we found a website showing the misery index for every month since January 1948. Economist Arthur Okun, an adviser to President Lyndon Johnson, devised the index. "A combination of rising inflation and more people out of work implies a deterioration in economic performance and a rise in the misery index," the site says. In a June 3, 2011, article, our friends at FactCheck.org pointed out that the index hit monthly highs of 13.63 under President Truman in January 1948; 17.01 in President Nixon's last full month in office, July 1974; 19.9 under President Ford in January 1975; and a record 21.98 under President Carter in June 1980. When Reagan won election, inflation was the prime mover of the index, though unemployment has been dominant lately. In April 2012, for instance, the index was 10.4, based on 8.1 percent unemployment and the inflation rate of 2.3. That was down from the highest index on Obama’s watch, 12.87 in August and September 2011, according to the index website. We checked Riddle’s claim against the index site, learning that he did not account for the misery index in the early part of Reagan’s presidency. The site, registered to NPA Services, Inc., in Richmond Hill, New York, says it collects unemployment rates from the U.S. Department of Labor and inflation rates from InflationData.com. By email, the site’s webmaster, John Naudus, told us he maintains the site in his spare time. We spot-checked annual unemployment and inflation figures for the decades at issue. Naudus’s site aligns with the unemployment rates on the labor department’s site and annual inflation figures on inflationdata.com. According to the misery index site, the index in Carter’s last year as president, 1980, was 20.76. In every subsequent year through 2011, the index was less than that. With Obama as president, the index increased from 8.94 in 2009 to 12.11 in 2011, according to the misery index site. However, that was not the highest index since Reagan succeeded Carter. According to the site, the index was higher than Obama’s one-year high of 12.11 each of the first three years of Reagan’s presidency: 17.97 in 1981, 15.87 in 1982 and 12.82 in 1983. For greater precision, we looked at the index month by month. This enabled us to compare the index in October 2011, when Riddle spoke, to the index for every previous month starting with Reagan’s presidency. The October 2011 misery index was 12.43, based on the 8.9 percent unemployment rate plus the month’s 3.53 percent inflation, according to the site. And does that 12.43 misery index outpace any such index since Reagan succeeded Carter? Hardly. According to the site, the index was higher in a couple of earlier months of Obama’s term and barely higher, at 12.60, in November 1990, when George H.W. Bush was president. Arguably, these instances are close enough for comfort. Still, Reagan experienced higher misery indexes at the start of his presidency. The index exceeded 14 for Reagan’s first 25 months as president, according to the index site, and remained greater than 13 from February through May 1983. By email, Brad Heritage of Riddle’s campaign sent a statement from Riddle saying the government changed how it calculates inflation and unemployment after 1980 and as a result, the index is lower of late than it would have been before the changes. A Bureau of Labor Statistics economist, Jacqueline Midkiff, told us the bureau does not agree that methodology changes weaken or invalidate unemployment rate/inflation rate comparisons across decades. She pointed out an August 2008 bureau article on inflation-rate myths and a 1994 bureau paper including information on comparing jobless rates over time. Our ruling When Riddle spoke, the U.S. misery index was 12.43 -- higher than the index over much of the previous 30 years. Riddle said, though, that the index was the highest it had been since Reagan succeeded Carter. That's not correct. The index was higher for nearly 30 months of Reagan’s presidency. His statement fails to account for the index’s full history. We rate his claim as False. | null | Wes Riddle | null | null | null | 2012-06-08T16:45:42 | 2011-10-22 | ['Jimmy_Carter', 'Ronald_Reagan'] |
pomt-00269 | Says Rep. Kyrsten Sinema supported a bill that is "essentially encouraging child trafficking." | false | /arizona/statements/2018/oct/02/martha-mcsally/did-kyrsten-sinema-support-bill-encouraging-child-/ | The federal government’s separation of children from their parents as they arrived at the southwest border is pivotal in Arizona’s Senate race. Republican U.S. Rep. Martha McSally said in a Sept. 16 Fox News interview that her party was working on a bill to enforce the laws and keep families together. She claimed that her Democratic opponent in the Senate race, U.S. Rep. Kyrsten Sinema, in contrast supported a bill that encouraged child trafficking. "My opponent and every Democrat got on a bill that essentially says if you cross the border illegally, and you have a kid with you and you commit a crime, another crime within 100 miles of the border, you can’t be arrested," McSally said. "This is essentially encouraging child trafficking and that’s what my opponent supported." McSally’s campaign told us she’s referring to the Keep Families Together Act, co-sponsored by nearly all Democrats, including Sinema. Did the Sinema-backed bill enable or encourage child trafficking? Not according to several immigration experts and researchers who study human trafficking. They said the bill is about keeping families together and that it includes safeguards against trafficking. Background on Keep Families Together Act U.S. Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., introduced the Keep Families Together Act in June amid calls for President Donald Trump’s administration to end a policy leading to the separation of immigrant families. Nadler’s proposal would prohibit the Department of Homeland Security, Justice Department, and Health and Human Services from removing a child (under 18 years old and without permanent immigration status) from his or her parent or legal guardian, at or near the port of entry, or within 100 miles of the U.S. border. However, the bill lays out several circumstances in which border officials can separate children. A child could be removed if: • the child is a victim of trafficking or is at significant risk of becoming a victim of trafficking; • there is a strong likelihood that the adult is not the parent or legal guardian of the child; and • the child is in danger of abuse or neglect at the hands of the parent or legal guardian, or is a danger to themselves or others. If a child is removed, an independent child welfare expert licensed by the state or county where the separation happened has to authorize it within 48 hours. If not authorized, families are reunited. (Experts said child welfare is regulated by states.) The bill also gives state courts and state or county child welfare agencies their own authority to separate a child from a parent or legal guardian, if it’s in the child’s best interest. McSally said that the proposal prevented the arrest of people who came with children and committed "another crime within 100 miles of the border." But the bill doesn’t say that. The bill says asylum seekers may not be prosecuted for immigration law violations until their asylum application is adjudicated. Under current law, asylum seekers must be in the United States to request the protection. They can apply for it even if they entered the country illegally. Nadler’s measure calls for periodic reports on separations. The reports would need to include whether an adult was charged with a crime, the type of crime, whether that charge was prosecuted and the outcome. Sinema’s campaign said the bill would keep families together while removing them from potential trafficking situations. The bill is unlikely to pass so long as Republicans control the U.S. House. Experts disagree with McSally’s assessment The bill diminishes federal enforcement and empowers "state government determinations that would likely happen well after the point of apprehension and detention on a federal level," said Torunn Sinclair, a spokeswoman for McSally’s campaign. Sinclair also argued that the bill incentivizes traffickers to claim children as their own. While it may not be easy to determine in some cases whether an adult is the parent of a child, border officials who come in contact with them are trained to figure that out, said David Kyle, associate professor of sociology at University of California-Davis. The onus remains on parents to prove a relationship, Kyle said. "No matter how the law is written, law enforcement officials have laws they can invoke if there is a suspicion that the child is not with their legal guardian or parent," Kyle said. "I don't think anything in the bill would undercut those laws and clearly supports exceptions based on those suspicions." The part of the bill saying an "independent child welfare expert" has to authorize separations within 48 hours raises questions regarding the practical implementation of the bill, Kyle said. Still, "on the face of it, I don't see the bill facilitating child trafficking," Kyle said. Dominique Roe-Sepowitz, an associate professor and director of the Office of Sex Trafficking Intervention Research at Arizona State University, also doesn't see the bill as encouraging child trafficking. "This is much less to do with sexual exploitation and more to do with separating families," she said. Our ruling McSally said Sinema supported a bill that encourages child trafficking. Sinema co-sponsored a bill to limit the separation of immigrant families arriving at U.S. borders. McSally’s team said the bill reduces federal authority and incentivizes traffickers to claim children as their own. However, the bill says a child can be separated if federal immigration officials believe that the child is being trafficked or faces that risk. Separation can also take place if there’s a strong likelihood that a child and adult are not related. Under the bill, a state or county child welfare expert has to authorize a separation within 48 hours. It also gives state courts and agencies their own ability to separate a child from an adult, especially if the child’s safety is at risk. Immigration and human trafficking researchers disagree with McSally’s assessment of the bill. We rate McSally’s statement False. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com | null | Martha McSally | null | null | null | 2018-10-02T15:10:38 | 2018-09-16 | ['None'] |
pomt-01206 | The conviction rate is almost exactly the same for whites and blacks who commit murder. | false | /punditfact/statements/2014/nov/26/rudy-giuliani/giuliani-black-and-white-people-charged-murder-are/ | In the run-up to a grand jury’s decision not to indict Ferguson, Mo., police officer Darren Wilson in the shooting death of African-American teenager Michael Brown, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani stirred controversy with a number of comments about race, crime and law enforcement. Following his appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press on Nov. 23, 2014, Giuliani faced backlash for questioning why the same Americans protesting Brown's fatal shooting are not voicing similar outrage about black-on-black crime. The following day -- hours before the grand jury decision was announced -- Giuliani stood by his argument during an appearance on Fox and Friends. He reiterated that the vast majority of black murder victims are killed by other black people, not by white police officers. (We rated this Mostly True, noting that the same pattern of intraracial homicide holds for for all races, not just for African-Americans.) Giuliani also sought to counter the perception that white people don’t go to jail for killing black people. "And the idea that whites do not go to jail for killing blacks," he said. "First of all, only about 3 percent of whites kill blacks. They go to jail at approximately the same percentage as blacks go to jail. The conviction rate is almost exactly the same. The difference is, it’s a very rare exception when a white kills a black." His claim about even conviction rates surprised us, given the widespread perception that black Americans are disadvantaged in the criminal justice system. So we decided to take a closer look at Giuliani’s claim that "the conviction rate is almost exactly the same" for whites and blacks who commit murder. Sentencing statistics Giuliani’s comment in whole is fragmented and difficult to parse, and he didn’t get back to us with further explanation. That being said, we scoured available data that might shed light on his claim about conviction rates. We couldn’t find a single report detailing the nationwide percentage of people who are charged with homicide and are ultimately convicted -- let alone a racial breakdown for that question. The most recent and comprehensive report we could find comes from the the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics. The report, published in 2009, looks at 2006 data on felony sentences in state courts, where the vast majority of murder cases are tried. It found that of all people convicted of murder or non-negligent manslaughter in 2006, 46 percent were white, and 51 percent were black. But this is not too helpful for checking Giuliani’s claim. For starters, this data does not separate out people who identify as Hispanic or Latino. And this finding means that African-Americans account for a grossly disproportionate percentage of murder convictions, since whites and Hispanics currently make up about 80 percent of the nation’s population, compared to just 13 percent for blacks. That undercuts Giuliani’s underlying premise of minimizing racial disparities in jurisprudence. We also found a 2013 Bureau of Justice Statistics report that looked at felony defendants -- that is, people who are charged but not yet convicted -- in the 75 largest counties in the United States in 2009. That report showed that African-Americans also make up a disproportionate number of murder defendants. Of all people charged with murder, 12 percent were white, 30 percent were Hispanic, and 57 percent were black. Either way, these statistics don’t back up Giuliani’s claim, because they do not show the likelihood that someone of either race will be convicted if they are charged with murder. We also reached out to criminal justice experts, and they weren’t familiar with a statistic that matched the specific claim. The big picture It’s important to remember a few bits of context. The conviction rate for homicide represents only a sliver of criminal justice cases and are not necessarily representative of the deep disparity between black and white defendants. For example, the Justice Department has estimated that one in three black males will go to prison at some point in their lifetime, compared to 1 in 17 for a white male. And out of all 1.5 million sentenced prisoners in the United States in 2013, black people made up the largest racial demographic, at about 36 percent -- well above their share of the population as a whole. "I do not know why (Giuliani) would limit his comments to murder," said Delores Jones-Brown, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. "When all offenses are taken into consideration, especially drug crimes, the black incarceration rate is substantially higher than that of whites." Nearly half of all people charged with felonies in 2009 were non-Hispanic blacks. They made up more than half of all people charged with murder, robbery, drug trafficking and weapons-related offenses. And Nazgol Ghandnoosh, a researcher at the Sentencing Project, an advocacy group, pointed us to several additional studies that show racial disparities, such as a 1998 study that found that offenders who are young, black, and male are subject to the harshest sentences, after controlling for factors such as the nature of the crime. Our ruling Giuliani said, "the conviction rate is almost exactly the same" for whites and blacks who commit murder. We couldn't find any statistical evidence to support Giuliani’s claim, and experts said they weren't aware of any, either. We found some related data, but that data only serves to highlight some of the racial disproportion in the justice system. And when you take a step back, Giuliani’s comment -- even if supported by statistical evidence -- would amount to cherry-picking data to shed the most benign light on racial disparities of the American justice system. Jurisprudence in general does not reflect this pattern. Without statistical data to back up his claim, we rate it False. Update, Nov. 26, 2014, 2:00 p.m.: Soon after we published this item, the Bureau of Justice Statistics officially confirmed to PolitiFact that they do not have nationally representative data on conviction rates by race. | null | Rudy Giuliani | null | null | null | 2014-11-26T12:56:00 | 2014-11-24 | ['None'] |
pomt-13730 | Says when an interviewer asked Donald Trump if he treats women with respect, Trump replied, "I can't say that." | mostly false | /truth-o-meter/statements/2016/jul/27/hillary-clinton/hillary-clinton-video-says-donald-trump-admitted-h/ | Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has been repeatedly attacked by his opponents for his sometimes-derogatory statements about women. At the Democratic convention in Philadelphia, delegates saw a video where some of those comments were repeated, but one caught our eye. At the end of the 30-second video a voice says, "So you treat women with respect." The video shifts to a younger Trump saying sheepishly, "I can't say that either" and offering a half-laugh. The clip is so short, we wondered if it was an accurate representation of the interview. We emailed the Democratic National Committee about its source. They couldn't immediately provide it but, meanwhile, we found it thanks to The Washington Post Fact-Checker examination of two pro-Clinton ads in June. The video shown at the Democratic convention was originally an ad released by the Hillary Clinton campaign. The source of the quote comes from a 39-minute interview with Howard Stern conducted in 1993 on the E! cable channel. Stern is not shown in the clip, although some might recognize his voice. The shock-jock is known for getting his guests to say outrageous things. The interview was conducted after a New York magazine article on Trump said, "His contempt for beautiful women who liked to be abused is boundless." The article characterized his philosophy as, "You have to treat them like s---," a characterization by author Julie Baumgold, not a direct quote from Trump himself. In the interview, Stern asks Trump about the quote. "No, I never said that," Trump responds."But it was attributed to me." After some chatter by Stern, Trump again denies saying it. "I see," says Stern. "So you treat women with respect." Trump smiles. "Ahhhh. I can't say that either," he says with a chortle. "Alright, good," says Stern. "Somewhere in between." Then Trump adds, "I treat women with great respect," his tone sounding more serious this time, but it's not completely clear because the camera, at this point, is on Stern instead of Trump. Stern then insists, with the help of a chart, that Trump rank his wife and girlfriends. When we asked the Clinton campaign if Trump's comment was taken out of context, deputy communications director Christina Reynolds responded with an emailed statement that "in a conversation about whether he respects (women), his first inclination is to say that he 'can't say.' That statement, coming during an exchange about previous disrespectful comments about women, speaks volumes and is perfectly in context with his lifelong record." Our ruling Hillary Clinton, in a campaign ad shown at the Democratic convention, said that when an interviewer asked Donald Trump if he treats women with respect, Trump replied, "I can't say that." The four-second clip has not been doctored. But this is an example of where context can be crucial. It omits the fact that Stern is the interviewer. The opening question of whether Trump said he treats women like feces, Trump's denial, Stern's assessment that it's "somewhere in between" and Trump's subsequent response that "I treat women with great respect" are all missing. Because so much is ignored in this brief clip— information that could give a different impression — we rate the claim Mostly False.https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/9e51f9c5-2a3d-4dd0-a2c3-6d8f7edac738 | null | Hillary Clinton | null | null | null | 2016-07-27T00:21:39 | 2016-07-26 | ['Donald_Trump'] |
pomt-03281 | For several days in July of 2012, Greenland surface ice cover melted more than at any time in 30 years of satellite observation. During that month, an estimated 97% of the ice sheet thawed. | half-true | /rhode-island/statements/2013/aug/05/brian-schatz/hawaii-senator-says-97-percent-greenlands-ice-shee/ | Everybody's looking for evidence that pollution, particularly the carbon dioxide released into the air, is (or is not, depending on your point of view) altering Earth's climate. On July 24, U.S. Sen. Brian Schatz, a Democrat from Hawaii, whose state stands to face some serious consequences if warmer temperatures cause sea levels to rise and storms to become stronger, was on the floor of the Senate speaking about an event in July 2012 that produced a dramatic change in the massive ice sheet covering Greenland. Because of global warming, "glaciers continue to retreat. The Greenland ice sheet provides a stark example of the rapid recession of the world's ice," Schatz said. "For several days in July of 2012, Greenland surface ice cover melted more than at any time in 30 years of satellite observation. During that month, an estimated 97 percent of the ice sheet thawed." Ninety-seven percent? One way to read that is that only 3 percent of Greenland's ice sheet remained. That would be A LOT of melting, especially for a mass of ice that is, over large stretches, a mile or two thick. Losing that much arctic ice would have a HUGE impact. Not only would sea level rise by roughly 20 feet, the ice would no longer be reflecting sunlight back into space, warming the planet even faster. We contacted Schatz's office, which directed us to two sources. The first was a web page from the National Snow & Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado, Boulder, which tracks melting on a daily basis. It says, "Greenland’s surface melting in 2012 was intense, far in excess of any earlier year in the satellite record since 1979. In July 2012, a very unusual weather event occurred. For a few days, 97% of the entire ice sheet indicated surface melting." The estimate comes from satellite measurements. We also found a NASA web page that reported that in July 2012, "an estimated 97 percent of the ice sheet surface had thawed by July 12." So the key word in each case is "surface." The melting the satellites tracked was at and near the surface, often to a depth of no more than an inch. The ice sheet itself never thawed, or came close to thawing. Dorothy Hall, a senior scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, whose examination of the event is to be published in Geophysical Research Letters, said unusually warm temperatures that month did produce some unusual melting, but it didn't wipe out most of the ice sheet. "Sen. Schatz's statement is very misleading," she said in an email, noting that her estimate of surface melt is even higher. "The correct statement would be that approximately 99% of the surface of the Greenland ice sheet experienced some melt during a two-day period in July of 2012. In fact most of the ice sheet surface re-froze within hours or days of the big melt event." Hall said that the last time that much surface ice temporarily melted was about a century ago. "If that begins to happen more frequently, that is a red flag," she said. At the highest elevations, "the surface will only melt a few centimeters for a few minutes or hours, so none of that liquid water can run off and contribute to sea level rise," she said in an interview. The thaw was deeper and more extensive at lower altitudes, producing some ponds and runoff, but even in those cases, much of the water re-froze, although quite a bit made its way to the ocean to contribute to sea level rise. How much of the ice sheet was actually lost? Satellite data show that Greenland lost about 325 billion metric tons of ice that month, enough to raise sea level by nearly a millimeter. That's a lot. Typically, 340 billion metric tons are lost in a full year, according to climate researcher Jason Box of the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland. However, the amount of ice lost was only about 0.01 percent of the nearly 3 million billion tons of ice locked in the sheet. When we asked Schatz's office if the senator misspoke, spokeswoman Xochitl Hinojosa stood by his comment. "The senator said that 97 percent of the ice sheet thawed . . . which means to become soft, and does not mean vanish. He also specifically said 'for several days in July of 2012,' so that it would be clear that he was not implying that the ice vanished forever. To suggest that the senator said it disappeared is inaccurate." Thomas Mote, a geographer at the University of Georgia, says it's a "common mistake" to confuse the thawing of the surface ice with the thawing of the ice sheet. "Certainly we did not lose 97 percent of the ice. Sea levels would quickly go up 20 feet," he said. "We would notice that pretty quickly." Our ruling Hawaii Sen. Brian Schatz said: "For several days in July of 2012, Greenland surface ice cover melted more than at any time in 30 years of satellite observation. During that month, an estimated 97 percent of the ice sheet thawed." His first sentence is correct. Because he also prefaced his comment by asserting that "glaciers continue to retreat" and the ice sheet "provides a stark example of the rapid recession of the world's ice," his contention that "97 percent of the ice sheet thawed," could easily be misinterpreted as referring to the whole ice sheet. Because parts of the statement are accurate but the wording of the second sentence leaves out an important detail, we rate it Half True. (If you have a claim you’d like PolitiFact Rhode Island to check, e-mail us at politifact@providencejournal.com. And follow us on Twitter: @politifactri.) | null | Brian Schatz | null | null | null | 2013-08-05T00:01:00 | 2013-07-24 | ['None'] |
snes-05959 | A Texas death row inmate requested he be served a child as his last meal. | false | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/last-meal/ | null | Junk News | null | David Mikkelson | null | Cannibal Pedophile’s Last Meal | 23 September 2014 | null | ['Texas'] |
tron-02662 | Serbian troops have been sent as peace-keepers to the U.S. | fiction! | https://www.truthorfiction.com/serbiantroops/ | null | miscellaneous | null | null | null | Serbian troops have been sent as peace-keepers to the U.S. | Mar 17, 2015 | null | ['United_States', 'Serbia'] |
afck-00328 | “Through the Accelerated School Infrastructure Delivery Initiative [ASIDI] which is part of the national infrastructure plan, 92 schools have been completed to date and 108 are under construction. About 342 schools have received water for the first time. Three hundred and fifty one schools have received decent sanitation while 288 have been connected to electricity.” | unproven | https://africacheck.org/reports/sona-2015-more-key-claims-fact-checked/ | null | null | null | null | null | SONA 2015: More key claims fact-checked | 2015-02-17 09:03 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-13771 | In 2009, pre-Hillary, ISIS was not even on the map. | mostly false | /florida/statements/2016/jul/21/donald-trump/donald-trump-says-hillary-clinton-was-secretary-is/ | Donald Trump told the audience of the Republican National Convention that ISIS wasn’t an issue before Hillary Clinton served as secretary of state. "In 2009, pre-Hillary, ISIS was not even on the map," he said July 21. "Libya was stable. Egypt was peaceful. Iraq was seeing, really a big big reduction in violence. Iran was being choked by sanctions. Syria was somewhat under control. After four years of Hillary Clinton, what do we have? ISIS has spread across the region, and the entire world." Trump made a similar claim pointing the finger at Clinton for the creation of ISIS in an interview that aired on 60 Minutes Sunday, a day before the convention began. While the name ISIS (or Islamic State or Daesh, etc.) is relatively new, the leaders and founders have origins that pre-date Clinton’s time as the chief diplomat of the United States. "There were evolutions that took place with some of the name changes," Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, previously told PolitiFact. (He has testified before Congress multiple times and works for a foundation focused on foreign policy and security.) The roots of what today is the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, trace back to 2004, when longtime Sunni extremist Abu Mus‘ab al-Zarqawi established al-Qaida in Iraq, according to the National Counterterrorism Center. After a U.S. airstrike killed al-Zarqawi in 2006, the group became the Islamic State of Iraq. In 2013, the group was referred to as the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham and then just the Islamic State in 2014, Brian Fishman, a counterterrorism expert at the New America Foundation, has told PolitiFact. "Al-Sham just refers to the Levant and reflects the group's increased focus on Syria," he said. "It reflects a geographic shift rather than change in political focus. It's the same group throughout." Given the timing, Democrats are prone to blame President George W. Bush for the creation of ISIS, because al-Qaida flourished after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Republicans seize on different moments. President Barack Obama’s decision to leave Iraq after 2011 contributed to a security vacuum that gave ISIS the chance to put down roots there, said Michael O’Hanlon, a security expert at the Brookings Institution, a centrist-to-liberal group. (O’Hanlon is one of hundreds of voluntary advisers to the Clinton campaign but has a minor role.) You could say the blame touches both Bush, for creating a strong space for al-Qaida in Mesopotamia, and Obama, for giving the group a chance to regroup. Trump is implying that Clinton’s actions had something to do with the birth of ISIS. Experts said his evidence is thin. For the earlier fact-check, Trump’s campaign singled out Clinton’s vote as a senator to authorize force in Iraq in 2002. She later said she regretted that vote. Republicans have blamed Obama for not keeping 10,000 troops in place in Iraq, which they say could have deterred the opening for ISIS. However, Obama inherited a timeline to exit Iraq from Bush, and there was no agreement to leave a large force behind. Trump’s campaign also highlighted Clinton’s support of regime change in Syria (which didn’t work out) and Libya. The overthrow of Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi contributed to giving ISIS an opening, said Christopher Preble, a defense expert at the libertarian Cato Institute. "Clinton's enthusiasm for regime change in Libya in 2011, which Obama endorsed, resulted in the collapse of order there, which ISIS and others have exploited," he said. "That is a fair criticism, in my opinion." But experts said Clinton isn’t individually responsible for the group, even if various factors gave ISIS the room to grow in power. The sources of ISIS are complex and interconnected, said John Pike, an expert on defense and director of GlobalSecurity.org, a website that provides information on defense. "She may ‘share some of the blame,’ but there is more than enough share to go around," Pike said. "She was in no sense the singular author of the thing." Our ruling Trump said, "In 2009, pre-Hillary, ISIS was not even on the map." The terrorist group known as ISIS was, in fact, on the map five years before Clinton became secretary of state. It was operating under a different name. There were several factors that allowed ISIS to gain strength, including the intervention in Libya, an Obama decision that she supported, and the Iraq invasion, which she voted for as a U.S. senator. But Trump misleads when he pins the rise of ISIS solely on Clinton. We rate this claim Mostly False. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/6ed72ab5-5513-4aa0-90ed-d2e0fea088bb | null | Donald Trump | null | null | null | 2016-07-21T22:34:19 | 2016-07-21 | ['None'] |
snes-05056 | A resolution passed in March 2016 forces residents of a Texas county to pay reparations to black citizens. | false | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/texas-residents-forced-to-pay-slavery-reparations/ | null | Uncategorized | null | Kim LaCapria | null | Texas Residents Forced to Pay Slavery Reparations? | 15 March 2016 | null | ['Texas'] |
vees-00187 | VERA FILES FACT CHECK: Trillanes' suspension is Sotto's 'top priority' as Senate president | fake | http://verafiles.org/articles/vera-files-fact-check-trillanes-suspension-not-sottos-top-pr | null | null | null | null | fake news | VERA FILES FACT CHECK: Trillanes' suspension IS NOT Sotto's 'top priority' as Senate president | June 04, 2018 | null | ['None'] |
pose-00615 | He said he will forgo the $130,273 salary if elected governor. | promise kept | https://www.politifact.com/florida/promises/scott-o-meter/promise/641/will-not-take-the-130000-governors-salary/ | null | scott-o-meter | Rick Scott | null | null | Will not take the $130,000 governor's salary | 2010-12-21T09:36:20 | null | ['None'] |
vogo-00342 | Fact Check TV: Filner's No-Show | none | https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/mayor-2012/fact-check-tv-filners-no-show/ | null | null | null | null | null | Fact Check TV: Filner's No-Show | August 29, 2011 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-07299 | Promotes a chart saying that Barack Obama has "increased the debt" by 16 percent, compared to George W. Bush, who increased it by 115 percent. | pants on fire! | /truth-o-meter/statements/2011/may/19/nancy-pelosi/nancy-pelosi-posts-questionable-chart-debt-accumul/ | A reader recently pointed us to a post on the website of MoveOn.org, a liberal group. The post features a bar graph titled, "Who Increased the Debt?" that offers figures for the past five presidents: Ronald Reagan: Up 189 percent George H.W. Bush: Up 55 percent Bill Clinton: Up 37 percent George W. Bush: Up 115 percent Barack Obama: Up 16 percent We can see why a liberal group would tout such numbers, since -- if accurate -- they offer powerful counterevidence to the claims by conservatives that President Barack Obama has been a spendthrift who’s set the nation on an unsustainable fiscal path. But the reader who sent it to us was surprised to see the debt increase under Obama was so small. So we decided to check the numbers. The chart actually comes from a Flickr page belonging to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., who posted it on May 5, 2011. Specifically, the chart tracks "percent increase in public debt" for the five presidents during the following time periods -- January 1981 to January 1989 (Reagan), January 1989 to January 1993 (George H.W. Bush), January 1993 to January 2001 (Clinton), January 2001 to January 2009 (George W. Bush), and January 2009 to April 2011 (Obama). We checked with Pelosi’s office to see what data they used to assemble the chart. They referred us to the U.S. Treasury’s "Debt to the Penny Calculator." First, we should note that we interpreted the caption in Pelosi’s chart that reads "percent increase in public debt" to mean public debt, not gross federal debt. Public debt is debt held by the public, whereas gross federal debt includes both publicly held debt and debt held by the government, such as money in the Social Security trust fund. Despite what the chart’s label suggested, the data we received from Pelosi’s office made clear that they had been using the gross federal debt number. So we’ll start with that figure. We can quickly dispense with the figures for Reagan and George H.W. Bush. The "Debt to the Penny" calculator doesn’t go back further than 1993, but we were able to estimate the figures for debt under Reagan and the elder Bush by using data from the Office of Management and Budget. OMB’s numbers are calculated somewhat differently than Treasury’s, but the percentage increases were close enough to what the chart said that we’re not going to quibble over them. OMB has debt under Reagan increasing by 186 percent (the chart had said 189 percent) and by 54 percent under George H.W. Bush (compared to the 55 percent in the chart). Instead, we’ll focus on the numbers for Clinton, George W. Bush and Obama. From the online calculator, we requested the daily debt totals since 1993 and picked out the ones closest to the inauguration dates of those three presidents, as well as the end of the month of April 2011. Here’s what we came with for gross federal debt: January 20, 1993 (end of George H.W. Bush and beginning of Clinton): $4.188 trillion January 19, 2001 (end of Clinton and beginning of George W. Bush): $5.728 trillion January 20, 2009 (end of George W. Bush and beginning of Obama): $10.627 trillion April 29, 2011 (closing date of the chart): $14.288 trillion This allows us to determine how much the debt rose under each president: Under Clinton: Increase of $1.54 trillion, or 37 percent Under George W. Bush: Increase of $4.899 trillion, or 86 percent Under Obama: Increase of $3.661 trillion, or 34 percent So we can dispense with Clinton -- in the chart, his figure is correct. But the chart is significantly off for both Bush and Obama. We found Bush to have an 86 percent increase, not 115 percent as the chart said. And we found the debt under Obama to be up by 34 percent, more than double the 16 percent cited in the chart. We quickly discovered the source of the discrepancy: Whoever put the chart together used the date for Jan. 20, 2010 -- which is exactly one year to the day after Obama was sworn in -- rather than his actual inauguration date. We know this because Treasury says the debt for Jan. 20, 2010, was $12.327 trillion, which is the exact number cited on the supporting document that Pelosi’s office gave us. However this error happened, it effectively took one year of rapidly escalating debt out of Obama’s column and put it into Bush’s, significantly skewing the numbers. Using the corrected figures does mean that, superficially at least, Democrats have a point. The debt did still increase more, on a percentage basis, under Bush than it did under Obama. But other problems with the chart and its methodology undercut even this conclusion. • Time ranges: Bush served a full eight-year term, while Obama had served just 27 months by the time the chart was compiled. If the Obama figure were to be scaled out to a full eight-year period, he’d have a debt increase of 121 percent rather than 34 percent, making his increase greater than Bush’s. To be fair, that would be a simplistic exercise -- but no less misleading than the chart. • Public debt vs. gross debt: Not only did the chart say it was using one statistic and then use another, it also cherry-picked the one that showed the comparison in a more favorable light. According to OMB statistics, public debt rose by 70 percent under Bush, 16 percentage points more slowly than gross federal debt did. And according to the Treasury, the public debt rose by 53 percent under Obama, compared with the 34 percent rise in gross federal debt. Those numbers would have shown the two presidents much closer in their debt creation records -- and that’s without even adjusting for the vastly different lengths of time in office. • Debt vs. debt as a percentage of GDP: Some economists will tell you that it’s not the size of the debt per se, but rather the size of the debt relative to the nation’s gross domestic product. This helps minimize the complicating effect of economic cycles and inflation. So how do those numbers stack up? Using OMB statistics, here’s what we came up with, using public debt figures not adjusted for the president’s time in office: Reagan: Up 14.9 percentage points George H.W. Bush: Up 7.1 percentage points Clinton: Down 13.4 percentage points George W. Bush: Up 5.6 percentage points Obama: Up 21.9 percentage points (through December 2010 only) So by this measurement -- potentially a more important one -- Obama is the undisputed debt king of the last five presidents, rather than the guy who added a piddling amount to the debt, as Pelosi’s chart suggested. Of course, all this goes to show that statistics can be used -- and misused -- to bolster almost any argument. After we presented our research to Pelosi's office, a spokesman acknowledged that the office had erred in assembling and posting the chart and that it was in the process of reposting it. The updated version – which corrects the mathematical error but not what we consider to be the three additional design flaws – can be found here. That's a step in the right direction, but it doesn't change our rating since it only occurred as a result of our fact-checking. We find so much wrong with this chart that we don’t think it contains any significant approximation of the truth. It made a major calculation error that dramatically skewed the debt increase away from Obama and toward George W. Bush. It glossed over significant variations in time served in office. It cherry-picked the measurement that was favorable to its cause. And it is contradicted by statistics for GDP-adjusted debt, which show Obama to be the most, rather than the least, debt-creating president of the last five. None of this suggests that Obama can’t turn things around as the economy improves (and Democrats can also take some solace in the fact that Bill Clinton did remarkably well in all of our measurements). But in communicating which administrations contributed the most to growth of the debt, this chart is a failure. We rate it Pants on Fire. | null | Nancy Pelosi | null | null | null | 2011-05-19T17:51:05 | 2011-05-03 | ['George_W._Bush', 'Barack_Obama'] |
tron-02170 | Aldi Giving Away 40% Off Coupons | scam! | https://www.truthorfiction.com/aldi-giving-away-40-off-coupons/ | null | internet | null | null | null | Aldi Giving Away 40% Off Coupons | Dec 21, 2015 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-09640 | President Obama has "the worst ratings of any president at the end of his first year." | mostly true | /truth-o-meter/statements/2009/dec/17/karl-rove/rove-says-obamas-approval-ratings-after-year-are-w/ | It's no secret that President Barack Obama has had a rough first year in office. His approval ratings in the major polls hover just below 50 percent -- a decline from earlier levels that has cheered Republicans and conservative commentators. In a Dec. 16, 2009, Wall Street Journal column, Karl Rove -- the mastermind of George W. Bush's two election victories -- riffed off the grade of a "solid B+" that Obama gave himself in a Dec. 13 interview with Oprah Winfrey. In a column headlined, "The President Is No B+," Rove wrote that "Barack Obama has won a place in history with the worst ratings of any president at the end of his first year: 49 percent approve and 46 percent disapprove of his job performance in the latest USA Today/Gallup Poll." We'll begin by clarifying a few points. First, we should note that Rove was guilty of rhetorical excess when he said that Obama's numbers are the worst of "any president" at this point. Gallup's historical data -- the longest-running of the major polling firms -- dates back to Harry Truman, who was the first president whose entire tenure was polled in a fashion that modern experts would consider scientific. So Rove should have argued that Obama's numbers were the worst of any post-World War II president at this point in his term. Second, Rove misspoke when he referred to measuring Obama's ratings at the end of his first year. By definition, those numbers won't be available until late January. But in assessing his statement, we've sidestepped that problem by asking Gallup to provide us the approval ratings for December of the first year in office of the postwar presidents, so that the ratings for each can be compared more directly with the figures we have for Obama. Third, not all postwar presidents came to office equally. Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, both Bushes and Bill Clinton were all elected, so their presidencies all started at the usual time of the year. By contrast, Truman, Lyndon Johnson and Gerald Ford assumed office after the death or resignation of their predecessor. Johnson's approval ratings roughly a year after taking office were around 70 percent, while Truman and Ford were both around 40 percent at that point in their tenure -- a level lower than Obama's today. But because the comparison isn't exact, independent analysts advised us to exclude Truman, Johnson and Ford from our analysis. So, here are Gallup's December approval and disapproval ratings for all elected presidents since World War II. (For Clinton and George W. Bush, Gallup polled on presidential approval twice a month rather than once a month as previously, so the numbers below reflect an average of the two December scores for those presidents.) • Eisenhower, 69-22 • Kennedy, 77-11 • Nixon, 59-23 • Carter, 57-27 • Reagan, 49-41 • George H.W. Bush, 71-20 • Clinton, 53-39 • George W. Bush, 86-11 • Obama, 49-46 Compared to these predecessors, Obama's numbers are indeed the weakest -- but he's tied with Reagan in that unflattering achievement. The similarities between the approval-rating paths of Obama and Reagan are actually quite striking, wrote Charles Franklin, a University of Wisconsin political scientist, in a recent post at the Web site Pollster.com. "Both replaced deeply unpopular predecessors," Franklin wrote. "Both enjoyed significant gains for their party in both houses of Congress. Both faced 'worst since the Depression' economic circumstances. And each in his own very different ways attempted to reshape government in the early months in office." It's worth adding a few words of caution about this kind of comparison. Ratings after one year don't necessarily correlate with ratings throughout one's term. For instance, in December 2001, George W. Bush's 86 percent approval rating was largely due to a wave of support after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Bush wound up his second term in the low 30s. Still, if you're making the comparison -- and political observers have been doing precisely these sorts of comparisons for years -- Rove's statement holds up fairly well. Yes, Rove spoke too loosely when he said that Obama's numbers were the worst of any president's, and he failed to mention equally bad ratings for Reagan, a conservative icon whose politics were more in tune with Rove's than Obama. But with the exception of Reagan, every other elected president had clearly higher approval ratings at this point in his tenure than Obama has. So we rate Rove's statement Mostly True. | null | Karl Rove | null | null | null | 2009-12-17T14:40:08 | 2009-12-16 | ['Barack_Obama'] |
snes-01059 | Was Adam Schiff's Sister Married to George Soros's Son? | false | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/adam-schiffs-sister-was-married-to-george-soros-son/ | null | Junk News | null | Dan Evon | null | Was Adam Schiff’s Sister Married to George Soros’s Son? | 6 February 2018 | null | ['None'] |
goop-02632 | Kendall Jenner, Bella Ha Hooking Up | 0 | https://www.gossipcop.com/kendall-jenner-bella-hadid-hooking-up-lesbian/ | null | null | null | Holly Nicol | null | Kendall Jenner, Bella Hadid NOT Hooking Up, Despite Fake News Report | 10:28 am, July 27, 2017 | null | ['None'] |
pose-01052 | It’s time that St. Petersburg’s Mayor, like so many other mayors, delivers an annual State of the City address to keep the public better informed. I will do that, and I will make myself and my staff available to the press on a regular basis. | promise kept | https://www.politifact.com/florida/promises/krise-o-meter/promise/1134/deliver-state-city-address-every-year/ | null | krise-o-meter | Rick Kriseman | null | null | Deliver state of city address every year | 2013-12-31T12:16:31 | null | ['None'] |
tron-00660 | Miley Cyrus Burns Bible to Promote Tolerance | fiction! | https://www.truthorfiction.com/miley-cyrus-burns-bible-to-promote-tolerance/ | null | celebrities | null | null | null | Miley Cyrus Burns Bible to Promote Tolerance | Jun 19, 2015 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-14674 | In Houston, Texas, today, there are no homeless veterans. | mostly false | /texas/statements/2016/jan/15/jeb-bush/jeb-bush-says-there-are-no-homeless-veterans-houst/ | At a campaign stop in West Palm Beach on Dec. 28, 2015, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush answered questions about immigration, gun control and his candidacy for president. After his speech to an audience of Florida Republicans at the Forum Club of Palm Beaches, Bush was asked, "If elected president, what would you and your administration do to improve veterans’ medical benefits?" Bush said he would institute career civil service reform at the Veterans Administration, lead the VA to focus on "being world class for a few selected unique challenges veterans face" rather than providing all services, and give veterans more choices on where to go for their health care. Then, Bush brought up his childhood home, Houston. "Can I make another point? I want to tout something," he told the crowd. "Three months ago I was in Houston, Texas, and a guy who I met woke up one day and he said, ‘I do not want to see a homeless veteran on the streets of Houston.’ He’s a successful guy – he had the resources to draw people towards this cause. "And in Houston, Texas, today, there are no homeless veterans," Bush said. This program, Bush said, was an example of the effectiveness of "bottom-up government." "They didn’t wait for a federal government to create a program," he said of Houston. "They didn’t wait for Washington to do anything. They said, ‘This is the definition of who we are.’" Houston was hardly alone in confronting homelessness among veterans. In 2009, as part of a broader initiative on homelessness, President Barack Obama announced a plan to end veteran homelessness nationwide by 2015 -- a goal that wasn’t entirely fulfilled, according to a June 2015 Houston Chronicle news story. So, did Houston wipe out homelessness among veterans, even if the country didn’t? Bush made us wonder. Effectively ending veteran homelessness Although the federal government began its initiative on veteran homelessness in 2009, Houston didn’t begin its push in earnest until June 2012 with "Housing Houston’s Heroes," a program with the initial goal to house 100 homeless veterans in 100 days, according to staff in the Mayor’s Office for Homeless Initiatives. Communities around the country tally their homeless populations with a "point-in-time count" each January. In January 2012, five months before it began targeting veteran homelessness, Houston counted 7,187 homeless residents, including 1,162 veterans. In January 2015, the city counted 4,609 homeless residents, including 563 veterans. The city has housed many of those veterans in the months since, but does not have a more recent count, according to the Mayor’s Office for Homeless Initiatives. In January 2015, according to the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, an estimated 47,725 veterans nationwide were homeless, down 36 percent since 2010, shortly after Obama declared the federal initiative. "Veterans experience homelessness for many of the same reasons that non-veterans do," the council says, but exposure to combat and repeated deployments as well as high rates of post-traumatic stress disorder, brain injury and sexual trauma among veterans can make homelessness more likely. Generally, the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness defines ending homelessness as having "a systematic response in place that ensures homelessness is prevented whenever possible, or if it can’t be prevented, it is a rare, brief and non-recurring experience." A Bush campaign spokeswoman, Allie Brandenburger, when asked the basis of Bush’s Houston claim, pointed us to news and advocacy articles including a list posted Dec. 7, 2015 by U.S. Uncut, a liberal advocacy group, naming Houston as one of seven cities and states that as of December 2015 were housing their chronically homeless veterans. The list was based on news reports and press releases from cities around the country on their work on homeless initiatives. Bush’s camp didn’t answer our questions about Bush’s broader anecdote--particularly who he was singling out as the hero in his description of a "successful guy" who used his influence to stamp out homelessness for Houston’s veterans. When we inquired, Carl Salazar, director of Houston’s Office of Veterans Affairs, by phone said Bush’s story sounded "fictional." Salazar said Houston’s work on veteran homelessness brought together nonprofit groups as well as city, county, state and federal officials. Brandenburger’s reply also noted December 2015 articles from the Christian Science Monitor, the Huffington Post and the Philadelphia Citizen that mentioned Houston as one of a handful of cities, including New Orleans, Salt Lake City, Philadelphia and Phoenix, that effectively had ended veterans’ homelessness. Houston actions For Houston, at least, reports of an end to veterans’ homelessness appear to have been based on then-Houston Mayor Annise Parker announcing in a June 2015 press release: "The Houston region has come together as a team to transform our homeless response system to effectively end veteran homelessness." The city celebrated the achievement at the time at a press conference where Parker was joined by three Cabinet secretaries who praised Houston’s work. We wondered about the details. According to staff at the Mayor’s Office for Homeless Initiatives, the mayor’s mention of effectively ending veteran homelessness means the city had corralled the resources to house and prevent homelessness for veterans in need. The program is focused on "permanent supportive housing," which uses grant funding from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to provide rental assistance for apartment units, according to Sean Quitzau, an assistant in the Mayor’s Office for Homeless Initiatives. The initiative works with the landlords who oversee these rental units, and allocates its resources to apartments, rather than shelters. As of November 2015, the Houston program, renamed "The Way Home," had housed 4,114 veterans since 2012, Quitzau said. (Quitzau first checked with Mandy Chapman Semple, the special assistant to the mayor for homeless initiatives, who leads that office.) Houston, the fourth-largest city in the country, has the second-largest veteran population, with 300,000 veterans living there, the city said in its release. The initiative on veteran homelessness was a partnership between 35 local agencies. ‘No homeless veterans’ Houston officials agreed that "effectively" ending veteran homelessness by having the resources to house any veteran who needs assistance doesn’t mean that there are no homeless veterans in Houston. Salazar, in the city’s Office of Veterans Affairs, confirmed that when we asked about Bush’s comments. "It’s true there are not that many homeless veterans on the streets of Houston," Salazar said by phone. "While it’s nice Jeb Bush touted all the work we’re still doing in Houston, it’s not true there are no homeless veterans here. There are definitely homeless veterans. It’s a moving target." The Mayor’s Office for Homeless Initiatives, which tracks such statistics, couldn’t offer an exact number for how many veterans remain homeless. The office did say that 900 Houston veterans experience housing instability every year and 50 veterans at any given time are moving through the city’s system on their way to being housed. Veterans who remain on the street, Salazar said, generally are there for up to three reasons: -- Some choose to stay on their own, usually because they have lived in shelters before and do not like the structure of those environments, or object to assisted living they are required to have there. -- Some don’t qualify for services because of prior offenses or records as sex offenders, usually for offenses that occurred after they completed military service. For the homeless with histories as sex offenders, even if they do qualify for services, it can be hard to get a landlord’s approval to be placed in an apartment complex. And veterans who were discharged from the military with bad conduct may not qualify for some of the VA services available, though a bad conduct discharge generally will not disqualify a veteran from all services for the homeless. -- And some who fall into homelessness for the first time, rather than being chronically homeless, aren’t aware of the resources available and fall through the cracks. Our ruling Bush said that "In Houston, Texas today, there are no homeless veterans." Houston is one of a handful of cities nationwide that have "effectively" ended veteran homelessness by revamping their resources and systems to handle all veterans who seek support. The city’s success in that regard has been measured by benchmarks set by national and local initiatives on homelessness. Being equipped to provide housing for all homeless veterans doesn’t mean that every veteran is housed. Some remain homeless in Houston, whether by choice, a lack of awareness of housing resources or eligibility. We rate Bush's statement Mostly False. Mostly False: The statement contains an element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression. | null | Jeb Bush | null | null | null | 2016-01-15T18:11:52 | 2015-12-28 | ['Houston', 'Texas'] |
wast-00070 | President Trump mentioned the issue of the so-called interference of Russia with the American elections, and I had to reiterate things I said several times, including during our personal contacts, that the Russian state has never interfered and is not going to interfere into internal American affairs, including election process. | false | ERROR: type should be string, got " https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2018/07/16/the-facts-missing-from-trump-and-putins-news-conference/" | null | null | Vladimir Putin | Salvador Rizzo | null | The facts missing from Trump and Putin's news conference | July 16 | null | ['United_States', 'Russia'] |
snes-06302 | The remains of a smoldering JATO-equipped Chevrolet Impala were found embedded in the side of a cliff in the Arizona desert. | false | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/carmageddon/ | null | Automobiles | null | David Mikkelson | null | JATO Car Embedded in Cliff? | 20 February 2002 | null | ['Arizona'] |
pomt-10158 | Palin supports "aerial hunting of wolves and other wildlife." | true | /truth-o-meter/statements/2008/oct/01/defenders-wildlife-action-fund-defenders-wildlife-/palin-supports-aerial-shooting-for-a-reason/ | Produced by the political arm of the Defenders of Wildlife Action, a new television ad takes aim at Sarah Palin’s position on wildlife issues. The minute-long video starts by juxtaposing Palin’s darkened picture with majestic images of a bear and a wolf, while an announcer talks about her support for an aerial predator-control program. "The more voters learn about Sarah Palin, the less there is to like. As Alaska governor, Sarah Palin actively promotes the brutal and unethical aerial hunting of wolves and other wildlife," the narrator says. "Using a low-flying plane, they kill in winter, when there is no way to escape. Riddled with gunshots, biting at their backs in agony, they die a brutal death. And Palin even encouraged the cruelty by proposing a $150 bounty for the severed foreleg of each killed wolf. And then introduced a bill to make the killing easier," the narrator says. "Do we really want a vice president who champions such savagery?" The ad shows grisly video footage: low-flying aircraft with gunners leaning out the door shooting wolves and bears from the air. The plane later lands and the shooter finalizes the kill. In one picture, a wolf’s carcass hangs from one of the plane’s wing braces. For this item, we'll focus on the claim that Palin promotes "aerial hunting of wolves and other wildlife." Palin’s record on the issue is actually quite clear. As a candidate, and as governor, the Republican has endorsed wildlife management practices that include the controversial use of airplanes to thin out predator populations. But in Alaska, frontier politics look different than they do in the Lower 48. Alaska has vast populations of wolves, bears, caribou and moose, and sportsmen who hunt and sometimes live off those species. “If I am elected, I don’t want you to be surprised that I am a proponent of predator control in order to build those populations of moose and caribou,” Palin said, according to news reports from a gubernatorial debate in 2006. Alaska state officials take issue with the use of the phrase “aerial hunting,” preferring “aerial shooting.” “The predator-control program that we do — that isn’t hunting and we never claimed it is,” said Tim Barry, spokesman for the Alaska Department of Fish & Game. “It deliberately gives hunters an unfair advantage. That’s what we want.” It’s tougher to assess the ad’s subjective assessment that such practices are “brutal and unethical,” though many wildlife groups would agree. Defenders of Wildlife has filed lawsuits challenging Alaska’s wildlife management practices. President Rodger Schlickeisen said his group takes the view that any killing of animals, outside of a biological emergency, is unwarranted. In September 2007, more than 120 scientists signed a letter to Palin that questioned the biological basis for the state’s intensive predator management. Aerial hunting has been banned since 1972 in every state but Alaska, which gets around the federal law by claiming that predator population control is more important. The ad is missing an important note of context. Unlike other areas around the United States where wolf populations are smaller, Alaska officials count between 7,000 and 11,000 in the state. Wolf populations are managed in five parts of the state as part of a program that began in 2003 under former Gov. Frank Murkowski. In 2007, Palin’s administration proposed enhancements to encourage hunters to kill more wolves when it became clear that not enough wolves were being taken out of the population to meet the state’s goal for the year. Palin’s office announced a plan to pay hunters $150 for each wolf killed with the money to be paid when hunters turned in the left foreleg of dead wolves to state biologists. The program was axed by a judge who ruled it an improper bounty on wildlife. “I have said many times that my administration is committed to management of game for abundance, and to a proactive, science-based predator management program where appropriate,” the governor said in a news release at the time. We find her actions are adequate to support the statement that she promotes aerial shooting. But the environmental group’s categorization of the program is debatable and not putting it within the context of a state predator management program is a bit misleading. We find the claim is True. | null | Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund | null | null | null | 2008-10-01T00:00:00 | 2008-09-26 | ['None'] |
snes-05907 | U.S. farmers are saturating wheat crops with the herbicide Roundup as a desiccant before each harvest, causing an increase in wheat-related ailments. | mixture | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/grain-of-truth/ | null | Food | null | David Mikkelson | null | The Real Reason Wheat is Toxic | 25 December 2014 | null | ['United_States'] |
snes-04362 | Sen. Bernie Sanders left the Democratic Party during the DNC (possibly as part of the #Demexit protest). | mostly false | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/bernie-sanders-leaves-the-democratic-party/ | null | Ballot Box | null | Kim LaCapria | null | Bernie Sanders Leaves the Democratic Party | 28 July 2016 | null | ['Bernie_Sanders', 'Democratic_National_Committee', 'Democratic_Party_(United_States)'] |
snes-01449 | President Trump Abruptly Shuts Down Dogs for Wounded Warriors Program? | mixture | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-dogs-veterans-day/ | null | Politics | null | Kim LaCapria | null | President Trump Abruptly Shuts Down Dogs for Wounded Warriors Program? | 13 November 2017 | null | ['None'] |
bove-00038 | Assam NRC Row: All You Need To Know | none | https://www.boomlive.in/assam-nrc-row-all-you-need-to-know/ | null | null | null | null | null | Assam NRC Row: All You Need To Know | Aug 02 2018 6:28 pm, Last Updated: Aug 02 2018 8:45 pm | null | ['None'] |
tron-03671 | jdbgmgr.exe virus warning | fiction! | https://www.truthorfiction.com/jdbgmgr/ | null | warnings | null | null | null | jdbgmgr.exe virus warning | Mar 17, 2015 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-07960 | George Allen voted for budgets that increased the national debt by $16,400 for every second he served in the U.S. Senate. | true | /virginia/statements/2011/jan/23/jamie-radtke/jamie-radtke-says-debt-grew-16000-every-second-geo/ | Jamie Radtke was not being kind when she said Americans are indebted for George Allen’s former service in the U.S. Senate. Radtke, a Tea Party organizer, is the first announced candidate in an expected large GOP primary field for the U.S. Senate next year. Allen, a fellow Republican, is signalling he’s on the verge of declaring he will seek to regain the seat he held for one term before losing to Democrat Jim Webb in 2006. Radtke fired a warning shot at Allen along with a challenge to meet monthly across Virginia and debate "the serious problems facing America." "For example, during Sen. Allen’s six years in office, he voted for budgets adding $3.1 trillion to the national debt -- that’s $16,400 for every second Sen. Allen was in office," Radtke said in a Jan. 17 news release. That’s the price of a brand new, four-door Chevy Cobalt for ever second Allen was in the Senate 2001 and 2007, according to a Google search. We revved our engines to see if Radtke is right. Chuck Hansen, a spokesman for Radtke, said they based their calculation on the national debt growth between the last day of 2001 and the final day of 2007. That was a mistake. The federal fiscal year runs from Oct. 1 through Sept. 30. The first spending votes Allen cast in the Senate were for the budget that began Oct. 1, 2001 -- some three months before Radtke started counting. And the last spending votes Allen cast were for the budget that started Oct. 1, 2006 -- five weeks before his defeat -- and ended Sept. 30, 2007. That’s some three months before Radtke stopped counting. So our period runs from Oct. 1, 2001 to Sept. 30, 2007. Next, we visited a U.S. Department of Treasury website to determine the national debt on each date. Rounding off, it started at $5.806 trillion and ended at $9.008 trillion. That means federal budgets passed during Allen’s term increased debt by $3.202 trillion. Did the former Senator approve all of it? Congress does not hold simple up or down votes on the federal budget. Instead, it votes on a series of appropriations for various department. We turned to THOMAS, a Library of Congress web site that records the action on Capitol Hill. We found Allen supported each of about four dozen appropriation bills that came to Senate floor during his term. So we made no deductions from the $3.202 trillion increase in debt. Allen served 2,193 days in the Senate -- from Jan. 3, 2001 to Jan. 4, 2007. That’s 189,475,200 seconds. He voted for budgets that increased the debt by $16,896.68 per second. That’s almost $497 a second more than Radtke credited to Allen. So we’ve added a kickin’ stereo to the basic features of our Chevy Cobalt. But before you get angry at Allen, consider this: The debt has risen by $54,684.24 a second since he left office. And Webb has voted "yea" on each 27 appropriations bills that helped get it there. In case you’re wondering, we have now upgraded to a brand new, fully-loaded Lincoln Navigator every second. We’re talking about a luxury SUV with leather seats, parking sensors, GPS, rain-detecting wipers and sound that will make you think you’re in Carnegie Hall. Only problem is it gets 14 miles a gallon, so it will cost us down the road. Let’s review Radtke said the Allen voted for budgets that increased the debt by $16,400 every second he was in the Senate. Her formula was a bit flawed; the actual figure is $16,896.68 a second. We find it hard to penalize Radtke for a slight mistake she made in her opponent’s favor. So we rate her statement True. | null | Jamie Radtke | null | null | null | 2011-01-23T20:00:00 | 2011-01-17 | ['George_Allen_(U.S._politician)', 'United_States'] |
snes-06176 | A photograph showing Barack and Michelle Obama saluting the U.S. flag with their left hands. | false | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/left-handed-salute/ | null | Politicians | null | David Mikkelson | null | Left-Handed Salute | 6 December 2009 | null | ['United_States', 'Barack_Obama', 'Michelle_Obama'] |
chct-00312 | FACT CHECK: Does Obamacare Allow States To Waive Protections For Pre-Existing Conditions? | verdict: false | http://checkyourfact.com/2017/09/27/fact-check-does-obamacare-allow-states-to-waive-protections-for-pre-existing-conditions/ | null | null | null | David Sivak | Fact Check Editor | null | null | 5:30 PM 09/27/2017 | null | ['None'] |
snes-03577 | Midterm exams at Yale were canceled because students were too upset by Donald Trump's election. | mostly false | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/yale-cancels-midterms-after-students-were-upset-by-trumps-win/ | null | Uncategorized | null | Kim LaCapria | null | Yale Cancels Midterms After Students Were Upset by Trump’s Win | 10 November 2016 | null | ['Yale_University', 'Donald_Trump'] |
hoer-01191 | Prayers for Likes Facebook Sick Baby | facebook scams | https://www.hoax-slayer.net/prayers-for-likes-facebook-sick-baby-scam/ | null | null | null | Brett M. Christensen | null | Prayers for Likes Facebook Sick Baby Scam | May 20, 2014 | null | ['None'] |
abbc-00107 | The claim: Kevin Rudd says the Coalition's paid parental leave scheme costs $22 billion, which he says is more than the Government spends on childcare support. | in-the-red | http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-09-04/kevin-rudd-parental-leave-child-care-comparison-incorrect/4908332 | The claim: Kevin Rudd says the Coalition's paid parental leave scheme costs $22 billion, which he says is more than the Government spends on childcare support. | ['community-and-society', 'family-and-children', 'child-care', 'federal-government', 'federal-elections', 'alp', 'rudd-kevin', 'australia'] | null | null | ['community-and-society', 'family-and-children', 'child-care', 'federal-government', 'federal-elections', 'alp', 'rudd-kevin', 'australia'] | Kevin Rudd's parental leave, child care comparison incorrect | Fri 6 Sep 2013, 1:10am | null | ['Kevin_Rudd', 'Coalition_(Australia)'] |
vogo-00308 | Statement: “(Alex) Spanos is on the list of the 400 richest people in the United States, with a fortune estimated at more than $1 billion,” columnist Ron Carrico wrote for the Daily Transcript Oct. 17. | determination: mostly true | https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/topics/news/fact-check-how-wealthy-is-the-chargers-owner/ | Analysis: As fans debate the Chargers’ recent skid on the field, a broader debate continues to envelop San Diego’s professional football franchise. The team wants a new downtown stadium and hefty public subsidies to pay for it. Team and city officials say they are preparing a ballot initiative for an election next year. | null | null | null | null | Fact Check: How Wealthy Is the Chargers' Owner? | November 29, 2011 | null | ['United_States'] |
pomt-13641 | In the 2012 election, there were more votes cast than registered voters in St. Lucie County, and Palm Beach County had 141 percent turnout. | pants on fire! | /florida/statements/2016/aug/09/viral-image/viral-image-about-voter-fraud-completely-baseless/ | As Donald Trump muses about a "rigged" system that could cost him the presidential election, a debunked post detailing rampant voter fraud in 2012 is making a comeback. The image, which provides a list of seven examples of voter fraud in Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania, has been posted on several news outlets and forums (including Right Wing News, USA Carry and Conservative Stronghold) and has been shared thousands of times. The image was also shared in January 2013 on email, according to Snopes and FactCheck.org. For this fact-check we’ll look at the claims about St. Lucie and Palm Beach counties in Florida. Spoiler: Both are wrong. One statistic represents a misunderstanding of how votes are cast in Florida, and another is completely made up. St. Lucie County The post says, "In St. Lucie County, FL, there were 175,574 registered voters but 247,713 votes were cast." This allegation confuses votes with cards. St. Lucie County had a ballot with two pages, meaning voters who completed both pages cast two cards. According to St. Lucie County’s 2012 general election results, the number of cards cast in the 2012 general election was 247,383. Gertrude Walker, the county’s supervisor of elections, told us whoever made the image overlooked a disclaimer on the website at the time that explained how a two-page ballot differs from a vote. (It isn’t there anymore, but we can confirm it using the Wayback Machine.) The disclaimer said: "Turnout percentages will show over 100% due to a two-page ballot. The tabulation system (GEMS) provides voter turnout as equal to the total cards cast in the election divided by the number of registered voters. Also note that some voters chose not to return by mail the second card containing the amendments." The same page where the person took the number of cards cast also contains the number of votes cast. It shows that 123,301 votes were cast in the presidential election out of 175,554 registered voters. So the voter turnout for the presidential election was about 70 percent. Palm Beach County The post moves farther down the state to Palm Beach County, where there was a "141% voter turnout" in 2012. This claim is baseless, and there is no support for the 141 percent. County data for the 2012 general election shows there were 605,268 votes cast out of 870,182 registered voters. So, Palm Beach County had almost 70 percent voter turnout. Our ruling The post makes two claims about voting in Florida counties during the 2012 presidential election. Both are wrong. The figures cited about St. Lucie County mix up the number of votes cast with the number of cards cast. The Palm Beach County claim uses an erroneous percentage, with no real source. The post’s digs at Florida rate Pants on Fire. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/8d8e1cc4-149a-4c31-956c-c0d2654ef1d7 | null | Viral image | null | null | null | 2016-08-09T10:00:00 | 2016-08-05 | ['None'] |
snes-05316 | Drivers should be on the lookout for face-slashing car thieves posing as individuals seeking directions. | false | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/knock-slash-car-warning/ | null | Crime | null | Kim LaCapria | null | Knock and Slash Car Warning | 25 January 2016 | null | ['None'] |
hoer-01021 | Unsellable Roulotte RV Giveaway | facebook scams | https://www.hoax-slayer.net/facebook-scam-unsellable-roulotte-rv-giveaway/ | null | null | null | Brett M. Christensen | null | Facebook Scam Unsellable Roulotte RV Giveaway | April 10, 2017 | null | ['None'] |
wast-00029 | When times are tough, we budget for our families. But when our state's budget was in crisis, Phil Bredesen supported higher taxes on us: higher gas taxes, sales taxes and more. | 3 pinnochios | ERROR: type should be string, got " https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2018/09/06/koch-funded-group-misfires-with-attack-ad-phil-bredesen/" | null | null | Attack ad by Americans for Prosperity | Salvador Rizzo | null | Koch-funded group misfires with attack ad on Phil Bredesen | September 6 | null | ['Phil_Bredesen'] |
tron-03346 | Flood Destroys Noah’s Ark Theme Park | fiction! | https://www.truthorfiction.com/flood-destroys-noahs-ark-theme-park/ | null | religious | null | null | null | Flood Destroys Noah’s Ark Theme Park | Apr 25, 2016 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-04052 | The federal government owns 30 percent of the land in the 50 states, or about 650 million acres. | mostly true | /georgia/statements/2013/jan/28/jd-van-brink/claim-about-federal-land-holdings-holds/ | While the national attention at the end of 2012 focused on the various tax twists and turns of the fiscal cliff, the local conversation included its own tax talk. During a tea party meeting in Marietta last month, Georgia Tea Party Chairman J. D. Van Brink spent part of his speech denouncing property taxes. Most local governments have long depended on this type of tax to fund their budgets, provide services to residents and stock reserves. But Van Brink, like many other political leaders and conservative commentators, says property taxes are subjective and discriminatory against property owners. He went on to discuss what he called other government infringements on private property rights, including eminent domain. "Who owns your land if government can control what you can and cannot do on your land? And who owns your land if it can be taxed away from you? Who would want to buy your land once the government has decreed that it cannot be used for commercial purposes?" Van Brink said. He also said the federal government owns 30 percent of the land in the 50 states, or about 650 million acres. The property tax/property infringement debate is intriguing, but what raised our Truth-O-Meter’s antennae was Van Brink’s comments about federally owned land. Does the government really own this much of the country’s land? If so, where, and what is it used for? The federal government has owned land throughout the country’s history. From the Louisiana Purchase to the wide-open areas of the West, the government has held the title. Van Brink said his information on the federally owned acres comes directly from the government, specifically the Department of the Interior. Numbers used to describe anything dealing with the federal government are sometimes incorrect and difficult to track. But, taking slight rounding into account, an overview of federal land ownership by the Congressional Research Service published in February 2012 supports Van Brink’s statement. The CRS is a an agency within the Library of Congress whose staff of lawyers, scientists and researchers provides nonpartisan research to Congress. The CRS overview states that the federal government owns and manages roughly 635 million to 640 million acres of land, which is the latest data available. The majority of this land (about 609 million acres) is managed by four agencies: the National Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Forest Service. Most of the land is in the West and Alaska. Nineteen million additional acres in military bases and training ranges are owned and managed by the Department of Defense. The Congressional Research Service overview notes that the total amount of federal land in the country is not definitively known. The acreage estimates used in the report presume that the federal agencies have reasonably accurate data on land under their jurisdiction. The CRS overview also includes detailed federally owned acreage information for each state. Of the country’s total land base of 2.27 billion acres, the roughly 635 million to 640 million acres is about 28 percent of the total, within the truthful range for Van Brink’s 30 percent figure. "I was trying to solve some problems, and with the federal government owning land, it is land that could be used for productive use," Van Brink told us. "The selling of that land could be used to pay down the national debt." Van Brink’s land-sale idea is not new. In 2011, U.S. Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, introduced a bill to begin selling federally owned land in 10 Western states, including Arizona, Colorado, Montana and Wyoming. The Disposal of Excess Federal Lands Act of 2011 would have required the secretary of the interior to direct the sale of 3.3 million acres of land, including some forested land. The bill was not enacted and died. Georgia tea party leader J.D. Van Brink said the federal government owns 30 percent of the land in the 50 states, or about 650 million acres. Based on research from a nonpartisan congressional research think tank, Van Brink’s data is close to the published figures. The only difference is minor rounding. We rated the claim Mostly True. | null | J.D. Van Brink | null | null | null | 2013-01-28T06:00:00 | 2012-12-10 | ['None'] |
goop-02450 | Dakota Johnson A “Diva” On ‘Fifty Shades Freed’ Set, | 0 | https://www.gossipcop.com/dakota-johnson-not-diva-fifty-shades-set/ | null | null | null | Michael Lewittes | null | Dakota Johnson NOT A “Diva” On ‘Fifty Shades Freed’ Set, Despite Report | 4:32 pm, September 17, 2017 | null | ['None'] |
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